Category: Faculty & Staff

Women’s Athletics Pioneer Passes

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Women's Athletics Pioneer Tish Loveless

Ada Letitia (“Tish”) Loveless, Ph.D., women’s athletics pioneer and longtime Director of Women’s Athletics at Kalamazoo College, died on Thursday, September 22, 2016, at her home. She was 91 years old.

Tish served as Director of Women’s Athletics from 1953 until she retired in 1986. Prior to her arrival, there were no women’s intercollegiate athletic teams at Kalamazoo College. During her tenure, she established women’s varsity teams in tennis, field hockey, archery, swimming, basketball, volleyball, soccer, and cross country.  She is the most successful coach of women’s teams in the history of the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the oldest athletic conference in the country. Her teams won 28 league championships: 23 in tennis, four in archery, and one in field hockey. Her 1986 women’s tennis squad finished third in the nation. In 1992, Kalamazoo College inducted Tish into its Athletic Hall of Fame and, in 2015, the College dedicated the “Tish Loveless Court” in the Anderson Athletic Center.

Tish believed in the benefits of competition for everyone, regardless of skill level, and she worked tirelessly to ensure all students had opportunities to compete. She added new sports and classes based on student requests, and not just her own skills.  On several occasions, Tish coached sports largely unfamiliar to her at the urging of passionate students. Over the years, she learned, and then taught, fencing, archery, modern dance, folk dance, social dance, and swimming.

“Tish’s legacy includes the thousands of students whose lives she touched,” said Marilyn Maurer, coach emerita of women’s swimming and a longtime colleague and friend. “She opened their eyes to doors of possibility to which they hadn’t realized they already possessed the key. Many of her students remained in close contact to the very end.”

Tish earned a BS in physical education from the University of Illinois in 1948, an MS from UCLA in 1952, and a PhD in education from Michigan State in 1977.  In 1988, she was inducted into the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics Hall of Fame.  She received the Weimar K. Hicks Award from the Kalamazoo College Alumni Association for service to the College in 2002.

Thanks to the loving care of friends and caregivers, Tish spent her last days at her Kalamazoo home that she had shared with Marilyn Hinkle, a lifelong good friend and member of Kalamazoo College class of 1948.  Marilyn died on January 25, 2007.

Tish is survived by many nieces and nephews and their children, as well as several generations of Kalamazoo students who always treated her like family.

A memorial service is being planned for Saturday, November 12, 2016, at 3:30 p.m. in Stetson Chapel followed by a reception in Anderson Athletic Center Lobby. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Tish Loveless Women’s Athletics Endowment or the Marilyn Hinkle Endowed Scholarship for Arts at Kalamazoo College.

 

Beloved Biology Professor Emeritus Dies

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Kalamazoo College Professor Emeritus of Biology David EvansDavid Evans, professor emeritus of biology, died on September 20, 2016. He was 77 years old, four days shy of his 78th birthday, and doing one of the things he loved most—taking a walk on a trail. David’s 39-year career at Kalamazoo College began in 1965 and concluded with his retirement in 2004. “Biology is magnificent,” he once said, “and humbling, and goofy. In some sense, biology is best approached with a good eye for silliness, for it is stuffed with paradoxes, irony, and the ridiculous. This aspect of the subject is often the most engaging for non-majors, but it never fails to lead to more sophisticated material. I often used this movement from the ridiculous to the sublime as a teaching strategy in my courses.”

David’s area of specialty was insect behavior, and two important (and related) themes of his teaching and research were seasonality and adaptation. He earned his undergraduate degree in biology from Carleton College and his master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. His research was published in numerous journals, and he received many academic grants during his career.

His work took him to Africa many times. In 1982 he was a Fulbright professor of Biological Sciences at Njala University College at the University of Sierra Leone. In the early 1990s he visited the continent to study locust migrations on behalf of the United States Agency for International Development. His work and study in Africa became the basis for one of his K courses, “Ecology of Africa.” In 1995 he received the Frances Diebold Award for Contributions to the College Community, and in 1998 the faculty awarded him its highest teaching honor, the Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship for Excellence in Teaching. Those awards were related, in part, to the K marine ecology courses he co-taught with the late David Winch (professor emeritus of physics) on site at San Salvador Island and Jewfish Cay in the Caribbean. “On campus,” he said, “the class handled gray rubbery specimens preserved in jars. In San Salvador the students experienced the organisms alive and in color, and observed how they behaved in their habitat. It was like having one’s eyesight restored.”

Near and after his retirement he served during the summers as a naturalist at Fort Abercrombie State Park on Kodiak Island, Alaska. He loved that assignment, in part because of the “really cool truck” he drove, but mostly because of the liberal arts breadth of the work. In addition to naturalist, he worked as the island’s historian (delving into the area’s World War II days, in particular), and he wrote a weekly column for the island’s newspaper. Shortly after his final courses in a K classroom (spring term 2004) David served as “ship’s biology teacher” in a Semester-at-Sea program that circumnavigated the globe, with stops that included Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Myanmar, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil and Cuba. And long into his retirement he often contacted the College with alerts regarding the achievements of his former students, both majors and non-majors.

David always loved the liberal arts, a passion closely related to his academic and research interest in adaptation. He believed that the liberal arts was the best educational model to develop a broader range of reference and a better sense of humor, traits he considered essential for adaptation in careers and life in general.

He died taking a walk, an activity he loved (particularly along an ocean shore) and that he wrote about in his August 29, 2001, column in the Kodiak Daily Mirror, his final column for that summer’s season.

“For me, the last tide pool walks mean that the park season is winding down….[T]idepooling is one of the most unpredictable park activities in which I’m involved. We seem to have a particularly good time when children are along…

“There’s an Alutiq saying that expresses tidal rhythms in terms of using plants and animals as food: When the tide goes out, the table is set; When the tide comes in, the dishes are washed. The saying gets to the same rhythmic renewal that makes me appreciate this kind of field activity so much. I know I can go down to an area where I’ve been dozens of times, and I can be guaranteed of seeing something new and wondrous.”

K Professor Receives Lucasse Fellowship

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Kalamazoo College Professor Di SeussKalamazoo College announced today that Writer in Residence and Assistant Professor of English Diane Seuss ’78 will receive the 2017 Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for Excellence in Scholarship. It is the highest award bestowed by the Kalamazoo College faculty, and it honors the recipient’s contributions in creative work, research and publication. Seuss is the 28th person in the College’s history to receive the award.

Seuss was named one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a first in the history of Kalamazoo College. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently Four Legged Girl, and she has a fourth book of poems forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She is every bit as remarkable a teacher as she is a writer. She is a previous recipient of the Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship for Excellence in Teaching, and many of her students have been accepted into the most prestigious M.F.A. programs in the country. Poetry, she says, holds space for everybody. A ceremony to confer the fellowship for excellence in scholarship and creative work will occur in spring term, and at that event Di will give a presentation, more than likely a delightful hybrid of poetry, story and lecture. The author of this article can hardly wait.

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.

Dining Green

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Food Recovery Network members prepare unused food for donation
Food Recovery Network members prepare unused food for donation.

Fulfilling the food needs of an entire campus can be a pretty resource-heavy task. This is why dining services has been especially active in their efforts to create an environmentally-friendly operation. Those efforts include using locally sourced food, donating what food isn’t used, and composting what can’t be given away.

There are numerous benefits to eating locally. On top of tastier and more nutritious food, less travel time means significantly fewer carbon emissions by trucks and fewer preservatives used to keep the food fresh. Moreover, eating local foods supports local jobs and businesses. Food is considered local if it is grown or manufactured within a 150-mile radius of a given location. For K, this means much of southwestern Michigan, as well as parts of northern Indiana and Illinois. Some of these local products include apples from Crisp Country Acres, dairy products from Prairie Farms, bread from Aunt Millie’s, sushi from Hunan Gardens, and coffee from Simpatico and Kalamazoo Coffee Company. Most recently, free range eggs from Old Town Farm were added to this list, and it will continue to grow as the weather warms different fruits, and vegetables become in season in Michigan. Not limited to the dining hall, these foods can be found at the Richardson Room, the Book Cub and catered events. Look for the Michigan sticker that says “Local Flavor!”

A major part of creating a more sustainable dining operation is the reduction of food waste. Kitchen staff keep track of how much food they make in order to avoid excess waste. Still, many pounds of food go unused at every meal and ordinarily would simply be thrown away. This is where the Food Recovery Network comes in. This student group, founded last winter by Calli Brannan ’19, comes to the dining hall kitchen every Tuesday and Thursday to “recover” unused food and provide it to food insecure families in the area. In the weeks it has been active at K, the group of 16 volunteers has recovered more than 1,500 pounds of food. That translates to more than 1,000 meals to people in need. This food goes to Eleanor House, a shelter for families in Kalamazoo where more than 60 percent of the residents are children. The FRN seeks more volunteers so that it can expand its efforts and save even more food.

Composted food supports landscaping
Composted food supports landscaping at new buildings like the social justice center.

Not all food that’s uneaten is fit for donation. That food is composted. Every week a group of student compost interns collects between 600 and 1,100 pounds of pre- and post-consumer waste from the cafeteria and bring it to Facilities Management for composting. There, large earth tubs use augers and the natural heat from the composting process to accelerate the process. About six weeks later, the final product is used all around campus on landscape beds, notably at the Arcus Center and the new Fitness and Wellness Center. The use of compost on these areas will count toward LEED Gold certification – a trademark of sustainable buildings across the country. This symbiotic relationship enables both Dining Services and Facilities Management to run more sustainable operations, and students to live on a more beautiful campus. Moreover, compost is open to all members of the College community for use both on and off campus.

These are just a few of the growing list of efforts made by Dining Services to run more sustainably. The move toward a totally green operation is an ongoing process that continues to produce extraordinarily valuable benefits.
Text and photos by Jeff Palmer ’76

K Joins WMed to help local students dream big and enter pipeline to health science careers

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SC07417Kalamazoo College welcomes 24 local high school students to campus this week for Early Introductions to Health Careers Level II (EIH-II), a cooperative program between K and Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed).

The program intends to foster biomedical science and health career aspirations for underrepresented minorities and disadvantaged high school students, grades 10-12, in Kalamazoo County. Students will participate in interactive-presentations, hands-on lab experiments, note-booking, and be exposed to physicians, health professionals in allied health, and basic scientists.

The program is designed to improve students problem solving and critical thinking skills and “help them dream a little bigger and have fun,” said Dawn DeLuca, Healthcare Career Pathways Coordinator, Office of Health Equity and Community Affairs. According to DeLuca, EIH-II is part of Kalamazoo County’s first pipeline educational initiative for health professions. It also includes EHI Level I, a program for elementary school students, and Kalamazoo Education Enrichment Pre-Med Summer Program (KEEPS), a program for students in their first two years of college.

SC07430Two Kalamazoo College students are involved in KEEPS, which aims to add to the development of current undergraduate students who are science majors and interested in pursuing health professional careers through their participation as mentors and teaching assistants. The K students and high school students will also spend time with current WMed students, which include eight K alumni.

Laura Furge, Ph.D., associate provost and Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry at K is leading EIH-II students through numerous presentations and experiments in K’s Dow Science Center this week. Among students’ activities will be learning basic lab safety and practices, talking about sodas and calculating how much soda they drink, conducting extraction and HPLC experiments, learning about enzymes via “toothpickase” activity, looking at the structure of proteins through 3D printing, and hosting a notebook competition and poster tour in Dow.

SC07426“Pipeline, pre-professional and enrichment programs are an important strategy for addressing the educational achievement gaps and diversifying the health professions and shortage of underrepresented minorities in the health professions,” said DeLuca.

“We believe it may also contribute to reducing health disparities in students’ communities through their improved knowledge about health, social determinants of health, and active citizenship through service learning with community organizations.”

Hornet (and Bee) Artists Feted

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Jim Turner
Jim Turner

The Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo has awarded Kalamazoo College Professor of Music Jim Turner its 2016 Award for Arts Leadership-Educator, and the Arts Council awarded Kalamazoo College Alumnus Ladislav Hanka ’75 a Community Medal of Arts.

Turner, who directs the Bach Festival Choir, will be honored as “a recognized leader in arts and education community” whose work has a strong impact on the greater Kalamazoo community through art and creates positive and productive relationships in the community far beyond Kalamazoo College.

Hanka, whose etchings, prints, and drawings illustrate the intricacies and mystery of nature, is honored as a leading artist with a significant body of creative activity, who has received local and/or national acclaim, and has deeply affected the community through art. The CMA award encompasses all art forms–visual, musical, theatrical, literary, performing, multi-Hornet and Bee Artistrymedia, architecture or design. And, in Hanka’s case, collaborations between man and bee. His most recent ArtPrize entry, “Great Wall of Bees: Intelligence of the Beehive,” featured live bees that buzzed and danced and chewed over three rows of Hanka’s etchings—-detailed images of toads, salmon, trees, insects, birds. The bees built honeycomb along the curves of his lines in seeming collaboration that is at times startling.

Turner and Hanka are part of a group that will receive awards on Sunday, July 17, at the Sunday Concerts in the Park in Bronson Park. The event begins at 4 p.m. with the award presentation at 4:30 p.m. The concert and presentation ceremony are free and open to the public. A reception will follow at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. The reception is free but reservations would be appreciated. Reservations can be made by calling the Arts Council at 269.342.5059.

The Psychology of Film and TV Music

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Kalamazoo College Psychology Professor Siu-Lan TanProfessor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan convened and co-chaired a symposium titled “Film, Television, and Music: Embodiment, Neurophysiology, Perception, and Cognition” on July 6, at the 14th International Conference for Music Cognition and Perception held at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. This conference gathers more than 550 music cognition researchers from around the world.

The panel presented theoretical and empirical work using diverse multimedia excerpts from Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator, and various television commercials for products such as Doritos, Apple iPhone, and Gaultier perfume. The photo shows the seven participants of the Film and Television Music symposium group at a planning session the night before the July 6 presentation, at the Palio d’Asti restaurant in San Francisco. Seated left to right are David Ireland, Siu-Lan, Juan Chattah, Scott Lipscomb, Mark Shevy. Standing are Roger Dumas and Peter Kupfer.

Siu-Lan is a a leading figure in the psychology of film music and the editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia. She has been involved in several recent projects that focus on the role and power of music in movies.

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.