faculty

Decolonization is a Medical Necessity

Posted on
Associate Professor of Anthropology Adriana Garriga-Lopez
Associate Professor of Anthropology Adriana Garriga-Lopez addresses a plenary at the 20th United States Conference on AIDS

Adriana Garriga-Lopez, associate professor of anthropology, attended the 20th United States Conference on AIDS where she was interviewed by MD Magazine on the response to HIV/AIDS in Puerto Rico.

That response has long been the focus of her research. Specifically she studies the social ramifications of epidemics and how those ramifications influence the public health system in Puerto Rico. Although she finds much to criticize about the public health response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the island where she was born and raised until the age of 16, she is quick to note the debilitating influence on that response of the mitigating circumstance of the unjust power dynamic between the United States and its “unincorporated territory” of Puerto Rico.

Her work also studies the responses of the marginalized communities most affected by the epidemic, and there is much in those responses that have overcome the challenges presented by the inadequate public health response and, despite those challenges, been highly effective.

Garriga-Lopez’s interview was divided into four chapters: What is the Focus of Your Research?; Did Your Heritage Influence Your Decision to Pursue Anthropology? (which explores how colonialism manifests every day and an approach to decolonizing public health); What Challenges Do You Face? (which includes a focus on States, Bodies, and Epidemics [the title of a class Garriga-Lopez teaches at Kalamazoo College] and the fact that because social injustice affects everyone, everyone has a responsibility to understand and address it; for example, an effective response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic begins with understanding that it is in fact comprised of multiple epidemics; and What Are Your Thoughts on Some Researchers Considering Zika as the New STD?, in which Garriga-Lopez articulates the need to inextricably link public health and a social justice conscience. The former must go much further than emergency management and act on the complex issues of the latter, such as lack of access to basic rights and basic needs as well as an unbalanced power structure that denies democratic participation in distribution of resources to persons in greatest need of those resources.

Women’s Athletics Pioneer Passes

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.

Kalamazoo College Included in Fiske Guide to Colleges 2017

Posted on

Fiske2017_CVRKalamazoo College once again is included in the annual “Fiske Guide to Colleges,” a popular and useful resource for high school students and their families researching prospective colleges, compiled by former New York Times education editor Edward B. Fiske, a top independent voice in college admissions.

Fiske is a selective, subjective and systematic look at 300-plus colleges and universities in the United States, Canada and the UK. It’s available as a paperback book, as an iPad app on iTunes and a web program on CollegeCountdown.com.

Readers will discover the real personality of a college based on a broad range of subjects, including student body, academics, social life, financial aid, campus setting, housing, food, and extracurricular activities.

According to Fiske, “Kalamazoo is a small liberal arts school that opens up the world to its students—literally. An impressive 80 percent of Kalamazoo Hornets study abroad thanks to the
ingenious K-Plan, a quarter system that allows students to study abroad one, two, or three academic terms. And if you need an extra boost to round out that résumé, there is an extensive internship program.”

Other quotes from the review of Kalamazoo College in Fiske Guide to Colleges 2017:

“Kalamazoo aims to prepare students for real life by helping them synthesize the liberal arts education they receive on campus with their experiences abroad. ’The rigor of classes makes the academic climate seem competitive at times but it is pretty collaborative,’ says a sophomore.”

“’Being a liberal arts school, people are doing very cool and exciting things in all of the departments,’ one student says.”

“K students are very passionate and determined to make a difference…”

“[Students] take a liberal arts curriculum that includes language proficiency, a first-year writing seminar, sophomore and senior seminars, as well as a senior individualized project—an internship, directed research, or a traditional thesis—basically anything that caps off each student’s education in some meaningful way.”

“Professors give students lots of individual attention and are rewarded with some of Michigan’s highest faculty salaries. “Every professor I’ve had has been passionate about what they teach and accessible outside of class,” says a senior.”

“There are always tons of things to do on campus, like movies, concerts, speakers, and events,” an economics major reports. Students look forward to a casino night called Monte Carlo, homecoming, Spring Fling, and the Day of Gracious Living, a spring day where, without prior warning, classes are canceled and students relax by taking day trips or helping beautify the campus. (One popular T-shirt: ’The end of learning is gracious living.’)”

Fiske uses data supplied by colleges and gathered by Fiske researchers. These data can sometimes be out of date by the time the book is published. For example, K’s 2016 deadline for Early Decision I and Early Action admission applications is Nov. 1, not Nov. 15, as reported by Fiske. Also, K’s six-year graduation rate is more than 80 percent, not 77 percent, as reported by Fiske. Additionally, K’s newest major, Critical Ethnic Studies is not “coming in 2016,” as reported in the book. It arrived in fall 2015.

Edward B. Fiske served for seventeen years as education editor of the New York Times, where he realized that college-bound students and their families needed better information on which to base their educational choices. He is also the coauthor of the “Fiske Guide to Getting into the Right College” and “Fiske Real College Essays That Work.”

Hornet (and Bee) Artists Feted

Posted on
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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on
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.