Three Kalamazoo College seniors presented their Senior Individualized Project (SIP) research at the Midwest Symposium on Undergraduate Research. The event took place at Michigan State University on Saturday, October 5. The students, their presentation titles, and where they did their SIP:
Sara Adelman’s poster (see photo) won the Outstanding Poster Award for Biochemistry. It was titled “Effects of Copper Bipyridine Catalysed Alkaline Hydrogen Peroxide Pretreatment on Lignocellulostic Biomass in the Ethanol Production Process.” Adelman did her research with Professor Eric Hegg ’91 at Michigan State University.
Geneci Marroquin presented a poster titled “Reactions of Cobalt(II) and Nickel(II) Complexes Containing Binucleating Macrocyclic and Pyridine Ligands with Carboxylic Acids: Formation of Binuclear Co(II), Co(II)Co(III), and Ni(II) and Tetranuclear Co(II) and Ni(II) Complexes.” Her research was done in the laboratory of Professor Thomas J. Smith at Kalamazoo College.
Kendrith Rowland conducted his research in the laboratory of Professor Catherine Murphy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rowland’s poster was titled “High Sensitivity Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) Nanoplatform Based on Gold Nanoparticle Aggregates.”
Kalamazoo College Professor of Chemistry Jeffrey Bartz gave an invited talk at the symposium. That talk, “Detecting Cartwheels and Propellers by Velocity-Mapped Ion Imaging,” highlighted the SIP work of Ryan Kieda ’09, Masroor Hossain ’12, and Nic West ’12, as well as the research of Amber Peden ’11, Aidan Klobuchar ’12, Kelly Usakoski ’14, Braeden Rodriguez ’16, and Myles Truss ’17.
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 ’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.
So eventful was the junior year of senior Zoe Beaudry that she made sure the summer following was just as worthy in terms of experiential opportunities. Zoe studied abroad in Israel during her junior fall and winter terms. That was followed with spring quarter on campus, during which she worked toward her major in art. Then came a summer of two internships. The first found Zoe in Massachusetts, working with Israeli and Palestinian youth to build community across cultures and differences through art. The second half of Zoe’s summer was spent in Haiti, as an intern with International Child Care. ICC is a Christian health development organization that has operated in Haiti since 1967. It works to change the conditions of poverty that impact health and well-being. Zoe kept a blog while she was in Haiti. Its entries cover her first impressions and hopes and her first art session with children at ICC’s Grace Children’s Hospital. She also worked in the wider community. ICC’s community outreach program serves families of mentally or physically handicapped children in the community by sending hospital staff to their homes for weekly physical therapy or mental exercise sessions. News of her art sessions spread, and so she did artwork with children who participate in community inclusion program. The photo was taken after that session: Zoe is pictured in the back row, at left. Her blog entries are worth a read. Zoe’s senior year promises to be as rewarding as her junior year. Among other activities, she is a Civic Engagement Scholar (CES) for the program Partners in Art. The CES program is administered by the College’s Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement.
Alejandra Castillo ’15 will be the first in her family to graduate from college, and she is making her family proud every step of the way. “My three siblings dropped out of high school in the 9th grade. The fact that I’m at a prestigious liberal arts college is truly a dream come true, not just for me but for my whole family.”
Castillo is a Posse scholar, attending Kalamazoo College on a full scholarship awarded to teens from urban areas who exhibit high academic achievement and leadership skills.
Four years ago, while still a high school student, Castillo began work at a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization called WriteGirl. This summer, she returned to the organization, but this time on an “independent internship” through K’s Center for Career and Professional Development’s Field Experience Program. WriteGirl challenges interns to think critically about the world, to write about it, and then to voice their work out loud. Leadership, communication skills and self-confidence are qualities nurtured in the program.
“I came back to WriteGirl because I want to be as ready as I can be to enter the workforce when I graduate college,” says Castillo.
At Kalamazoo College, Castillo is majoring in anthropology and sociology AND distinguishing herself as a playwright. Her one-act play, How Miss Long Beach Became Miss Long Beach, will be performed at the Kalamazoo College Festival Playhouse as part of the Senior Performance Series under direction of senior Amy Jimenez. The Senior Performance Series will occur May 1-4, 2014.
“Alejandra has been my student in playwriting class, and she developed this play in an independent study,” says her theatre arts professor, Ed Menta. “It’s a heartfelt and funny story of a young Latina who has mixed feelings about her mother forcing her to participate in a beauty pageant. The play touches on issues of mother/daughter, body image, assimilation, and sexuality.”
Another Castillo play, Say Yes, a conversation between two young people in the parking lot of a convenience store in Los Angeles, was selected for the Kalamazoo New Play Festival.
The College’s Alumni Relations department invited (via an e-mail titled “Welcome to the Class of 2017”) the friends and alumni of the College to share in this year’s Summer Common Reading experience, part of the annual Orientation program. SCR 2013 featured a campus visit by author Vaddey Ratner, who spoke with faculty, staff, and the first-year class that had read her book, In the Shadow of the Banyan. The e-mail invited alumni to “join in on the reading as you think about a new chapter that begins in the lives of our new K students, and remember your first year experiences through this process.” The e-mail also included an old photo (at left) of the inside of Stetson Chapel, and to its call was received at least one response–from Moses Thompson ’70, from quite a distance. “I am in remote, actually very remote, Zambia,” he wrote. “Nevertheless I will find the book on line and join in. Just looking at that photo of the chapel,” he added, “reminded me of the last time I was there, in 1970, well after midnight one evening, sitting in the balcony preparing to graduate and leave the next day: somehow a very powerful place. And musing over the cornerstone: ’The end of learning is gracious living’, which we enjoyed transposing as ’the end of yearning is gracious loving’. Yet, that chapel had a powerful effect on me. It was at a time when the College was in a great transition of culture change, not smooth but turbulent change: for the students then it was a transition from in loco parentis, required chapel, and closed dorms, to personal responsibility, choice about chapel, and mixed dorms–a huge uproar this caused at the time. Trivial issues of change when compared to the enormous and sweeping transformations about to be unleashed around the globe; still, in a microcosm these small changes captured the energy and heart of new directions. It was not to be a simple coming of age for a generation of young people pushing the limits of their local environment. This would be a change in the way we understood personal responsibility, in and beyond our narrow community and interests.
“In 1972 I became director of a predominantly black organization, hired by phone and assumed to be black because of my name, and spent a few years in the midst of the nation’s worst racial tension. I went on to 30 more years in international development assistance. And the decision, and to be sure the desire, to take on these challenges might have been formulated at K, perhaps that evening, in the dark of Stetson Chapel, seated in the back row of the balcony, feet up on the pew before me: chapel no longer required, now a choice. The locus of motivation had changed from the outside and others trying to coerce, to the inside with a personal desire to go out and create something of value.
“Kalamazoo is a wonderful college and a great place to prepare for turbulent times.”
Thompson would have enjoyed the ways in which, during the course of two days, the author, her novel, and its readers touched one another and learned from one another. Ratner posted her reflections of her experience at K. She wrote, “My journey there was as enriching, exciting, and full of life-affirming discoveries and learning as any fantastical adventure conjured up by the magic of imagination. Indeed, I felt I was walking into a sanctuary of learning, where the essence of youthful energy and curiosity is focused in a shared endeavor to know, to understand.”
Researchers in the Bartz chemistry lab include (l-r): Jeffrey Bartz, Myles Truss, and Braeden Rodriguez.
Myles Truss ’17 and Braeden Rodriguez ’16 are learning a great deal about chemistry during their summer internships in the laboratory of Associate Professor of Chemistry Jeffrey Bartz. Among the lessons is the extraordinary patience and preparation required to run an experiment that shoots lasers at chemical compounds in order to watch how they behave. According to Truss, it’s “a way of seeing” a chemical component “that combines chemistry and physics.” But things don’t always go as planned. Lasers need fixing, problems arise in the “beam machine,” sample preparation may go awry. According to Bartz, when a high tech piece of lab equipment breaks down his response often aligns with the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). And who would have thought chemistry taught that? Rodriguez and Truss are completing data from a Senior Individualized Project begun several years ago, which shows another key element of science–how it builds over time and through collaborations. Part of what they seek through laser “sight” is nitric oxide (NO) released from interesting compounds. Nitric oxide happens to be central to the chemistry research of someone quite close to Truss—his mother, Associate Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss, whose research has found nitric oxide to be of great interest in several cascades of chemical events associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Truss and Rodriguez are testing theory, says Bartz, more “pure” science than applied—with two key products nevertheless, Bartz adds: “the research itself, and aspiring scientists like these two young men.” Rodriguez intends to declare chemistry as his major winter quarter of his sophomore year. Truss begins his first year this fall and is leaning toward chemistry as a possible major.
Are you ready for some Hornet football?! How about soccer, volleyball, golf, and cross country? Because student athletes from all these teams arrive on campus soon, led by football players like Ronnie Russell ′17 from Lansing moving in today. Ronnie, putting on a tie while mom, Paulette, and younger sister, Kathleen, help arrange his Harmon Hall room, joins his teammates for their first practice at Angell Field on Saturday, in preparation for their Sept. 7 home opener against Rose-Hulman. Hornet Men’s and Women’s Soccer players arrive tomorrow, followed by Volleyball players on Sunday, Men’s and Women’s Golf teams on Aug. 25, and Men’s and Women’s Cross Country arrive Sept. 6. Check out the Hornet Athletic webpages (http://hornets.kzoo.edu/) for full schedules, rosters and other info on fall athletics at K. Go Hornets!
Three student scientists/athletes transitioned from the laboratory to the gridiron on August 16, the first day for Hornet football practice. Jake Lenning ’15 (chemistry major, health studies concentration), Joe Widmer ’14 (chemistry major, biochemistry concentration), and Jake Hillenberg ’14 (chemistry and psychology major, neurosciences concentration) spent the summer doing chemistry research–Lenning in the lab of Professor of Chemistry Greg Slough; Widmer and Hillenberg in the lab of Associate Professor of Chemistry Jennifer Furchak. Lenning’s research involves testing for differences in two variations of a resin known as the Wang Resin. Widmer and Hillenberg were working outside the laboratory on the day I visited. Lenning plays wide receiver for the Hornets, Widmer and Hillenberg are defensive linemen. The 2013 season will be the team’s second on the new Angell Field, and Lenning is excited. “We had a good season last year,” he said, “and that success will be a good foundation to build a great season this year.”
Because its name sounds like a vintage fighter plane, one might think the “Heme Team” that works with this enzyme is a group of pilots or aviation mechanics. But P450 (short for Cytochrome P450) refers to a family of enzymes that do vital work in the human body such as clearance and transformation of pharmaceutical drugs in the liver. And the “Heme Team” (named for heme, an iron-containing chemical component in all members of the P450 family) are four student research assistants working this summer in the chemistry lab of Professor Laura Furge. The team includes Rina Fujiwara ’15 (pictured at left), Amanda Bolles ’14, Mara Livezey ’13, and Parker De Waal ’13.
According to Fujiwara, Cytochrome P450 2D6—one member of the enzyme family—is responsible for the metabolism (think: conversion into a useful form) of some 20 percent of the medicines we take. So it’s definitely a P450 worthy of study—which, of course, means nature made it difficult to grow in a laboratory setting (as sure as the vegetables your mother said were good for you always tasted terrible). In fact, a great many P450 enzymes are intriguing, and the chemical modification of them and their mutations could one day have significant application in making medicines more effective.
Enter the Heme Team. Part of its summer work, says Fujiwara, has been to use recombinant bacteria (bacteria modified to include the DNA of P450 2D6) to grow the enzyme. Then team members try to separate the purified enzyme from the bacterial culture. Last year, they came close to achieving the goal. This year they developed a new protocol in which the bacteria cells (think: P450 factories) grow more slowly. Fujiwara is also doing work to obtain an even more difficult to express mutant version of 2D6, and that work might become the basis of her Senior Individualized Project next year.
On the threshold of her third year at K, the international student from Japan (chemistry major and thinking about a second major in biology) has always loved science, particularly the area of nutrition. This is her first year in the Furge lab, and she loves working with Dr. Furge and her fellow research assistants. “They are great mentors,” says Fujiwara, “and always help me with my many questions, no matter how elementary those questions may seem.” One exciting side effect of her work this summer, she adds, is the enthusiasm it has sparked for cell biology and biochemistry, two courses she is eager to take during her junior year.
Another great side effect is Dr. Furge’s expertise in another kind of chemistry—baking! “She makes delicious carrot cake and blueberry pies and brings them in for her research students,” says Fujiwara. “I love this lab!”
Mara Richman ’15 presents work on mental health and the drug court system.
Psychology major Mara Richman ’15 is second author on a paper selected for publication. The paper is titled “Neurocognitive Functioning in Patients with 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome: A Meta-Analytic Review,” and it will be featured in an upcoming issue in the Journal of the Academy of Adolescent and Child Psychiatry. Co-authors include Paul Moberg, Ph.D.; Chelsea Morse, M.S.; Vidyaluta Kamath, Ph.D.; Ruben Gur, Ph.D.; and Racquel Gur, M.D., Ph.D. Last fall Richman studied and worked under the research supervision of Moberg at the University Of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) Perelman School Of Medicine’s Schizophrenia Research Center.
Richman’s research has prompted her to become further involved in mental health and psychology research. This summer she is doing work at a summer research institute at the University of South Florida (Tampa). She was selected from a field of 200 people to attend the institute. Her research there (under the mentorship of Kathleen Moore, Ph.D., and Blake Barrett, M.S.P.H.) focuses on co-occurring mental health disorders in the drug court system. Titled “Findings from a drug court program of female offenders with co-occurring disorders,” her work has been presented twice this summer at conferences and will be revised for publication this fall.
Three Kalamazoo College seniors presented their Senior Individualized Project (SIP) research at the Midwest Symposium on Undergraduate Research. The event took place at Michigan State University on Saturday, October 5. The students, their presentation titles, and where they did their SIP:
