faculty

Lamprey Research Unlocks Secrets of Vertebrate Evolution

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The work of biology professor James Langeland, as part of a large international consortium, was published in the journal Nature Genetics, one of the top 10 science journals worldwide.

Langeland has been part of the consortium working on sequencing and elucidating the genome of the sea lamprey (the simplest of living vertebrates and a species on which Langeland has worked for 16 years).

The title of the article is “Sequencing of the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) genome provides insights into vertebrate evolution.” The paper is the first presentation of lamprey whole-genome sequence and assembly. Lampreys represent an ancient vertebrate lineage that diverged from our own some 500 millions year ago. Scientists have studied the sea lamprey genome to gain insights into the ancestry of vertebrate genomes, the underlying principles of vertebrate biology, and evolutionary events that have shaped the genomes of existing organisms.

Langeland is the Upjohn Professor of Life Sciences at Kalamazoo College.

K Professor Wins Routledge Prize

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Dennis J. Frost’s article, “Tokyo’s Other Games: The Origins and Impact of the 1964 Paralympics,” has been chosen the winner of the Routledge Prize for the best article published in the International Journal of the History of Sport in 2012. The article appeared in the March issue of the Journal that year.

Frost is the Wen Chao Chen Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Kalamazoo College and the author of the book, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan.

K Undergraduate Poet is Up and Going

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Winter term 2013 finds sophomore Kate Belew working as an intern at the Poet’s House in lower Manhattan. Another stop on the creative journey of this English major. As a first-year student Kate received the Nature in Words Fellowship at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Education (Hastings, Mich.).

“It is an extraordinarily competitive fellowship,” says Kate’s mentor and Kalamazoo College’s Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss. “And Kate made the most of the opportunity with her project, ’Voicing the Natural.’” According to Kate, the project sought to speak through the plants and animals she encountered during summer at the institute. “I planned to create the project using persona poems, inspired by Conrad Hilberry’s collection of poems, The Fingernail of Luck,” says Kate. “As I wrote, the project shaped itself into sections, and finally into a collection of poems that I named But That Was In A Different Life.” The poems are threaded together by Wild Woman, a voice of nature within a female human. Explains Kate: “I walked the trails, read books of poems, took notes, worked with Di, and took the time to witness what was happening in the natural world.”

Kate has also published poems in national magazines: “Prairie” in Outrageous Fortune; “Spoon Out Indigo” in Cliterature (on online magazine founded and edited by K graduate Lynn Brewer ’05); and “Yarrow” in the print magazine Straylight.

Cultivating Community

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Shoshana Schultz holds the calendar for "A Year of Food in Kalamazoo"
K Senior Shoshana Schultz hold “A Year of Food in Kalamazoo,” a calendar created by her and other K students.

Cultivating Community is a first-year seminar taught by Associate Professor of English Amelia Katanski ’92. It’s a service-learning course that combines academic inquiry with a project rooted in a local issue or organization.

This fall, Cultivating Community students broke into groups to interview and photograph people active in the area food community for the purpose of creating a 2013 calendar titled “A Year of Food in Kalamazoo.”

Subjects ranged from farmers and farm worker advocates, to organic food vendors such as Bridgett Blough ’08, who operates her own food truck business called The Organic Gypsy.

Teacher’s Assistant Shoshana Schultz ’13 worked as a go-between for the students, Katanski, and the People’s Food Co-Op, the class’s community partner.

“The seminar engages students in a critical examination of national food justice issues and introduces them to local food vendors who face these issues daily,” said Schultz. “The calendar is a meaningful and active way to address food justice and for others in the Kalamazoo community to be part of the discussion.

Now a senior, Schultz took Cultivating Community her first year at K. “My first year completely framed the way that I got to know the Kalamazoo community,” she said. “I’m proud of the work the students did this year.”

The calendars are on sale now at the People’s Food Co-Op in Kalamazoo for $15.

K Professor Honored at International Conductors’ Competition

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Kalamazoo College Associate Professor of Music Andrew KoehlerAndrew Koehler, associate professor of music at Kalamazoo College and music director of the Kalamazoo Philharmonia and the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra, was recently honored at the 9th Grzegorz Fitelberg International Competition for Conductors, one of the more prestigious international competitions for conductors of all nationalities born after 1976.

The competition, held in Katowice, Poland, every five years, took place in three stages during November 17 to November 23, 2012. A selection committee, consisting of eminent Polish and international conductors and musicians, chose 50 participants from an initial pool of approximately 180 applicants. These 50 were invited to the first round of competition, from that 12 semifinalists were chosen for a second round, and from that, 6 finalists.

“I was the only American in the final round,” said Koehler. “We were judged on technical skill, our interpretative decisions, and our ability to work with the orchestra. It was a great honor.”

Koehler was awarded First Distinction, or fourth place, in the competition, with a monetary award of 10,000 Euros. The Krzysztof Penderecki European Music Centre also invited Koehler to perform sometime in the second half of 2013.

Yet a third award came in the form of Karol Szymanowski State General School of Music of the 2nd Degree in Katowice – the “YOUNG BATON MASTER” award granted by a Young Jury jointly to Koehler and Russian semi-finalist Stanslav Kochanowskiy.

K Students Will Benefit from Chemistry Grant Renewal

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Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge has received a renewal of her National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to support continued research in the area of drug-drug interactions. She will conduct this research with undergraduate science students at Kalamazoo College. Adverse drug-drug interactions are common among individuals who take multiple drugs (both over the counter and prescribed), particularly among older persons and among individuals whose bodies express variants of drug metabolizing (drug processing) enzymes. The research in the Furge lab will benefit human health by adding to the understanding of how certain classes of drugs may interact in individuals and cause drug-drug induced unfavorable medical events. Furge currently has five research students working in her lab and has mentored two dozen in her lab and many more in her classes over the past 13 years at K. Funding from the NIH will help ensure continued research opportunities for future generations of scientists. The grant will provide $225,000 over three years.

 

K Writer-in-Residence Publishes Multiple Works

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Writer In Residence Diane Seuss has been hard at work, and the result is a prolific fall and winter. Her poem “Either everything is sexual or nothing is, take this flock of poppies,” appears in the 2013 edition of the Pushcart Prize anthology, which is hot off the presses. And her poem “Oh four-legged girl, it’s either you or the ossuary” is in the fall/winter issue of Black Warrior Review. The poem won the Summer Literary Seminar’s Poetry Prize. “Hub,” a lyric essay, won Wag’s Revue’s winter contest (To access all of the essay’s pages, click on the arrow on the right margin). “I emptied my little wishing well of its emptiness” won Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition and appears in its fall/winter issue. Two poems, “I’m moved by her, that big-nippled girl,” and “The ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren’t see-through” will appear in Ecotone’s “Abnormal” issue. The poem “Hindenburg” will appear in a forthcoming issue of Devil’s Lake. In other news, poet Adrian Blevins wrote a review of Di’s most recent collection of poems that appears in “On the Seawall: Ron Slate’s Website.” Just reading/hearing the titles of Di’s poems is a rewarding poetic experience!

K Science Majors Present at Undergraduate Research Conference

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Six students who presented at the West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference
Scientific presenters at the West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference included (l-r): Carline Dugue, Josh Abbott, Amanda Bolles, Mara Livezey, Kelly Bresnahan, and Chelsea Wallace. Not pictured are Erran Briggs, Michael Hicks, Nicolas Sweda, and Associate Professors of Chemistry Laura Lowe Furge and Regina Stevens-Truss.

Nine Kalamazoo College science majors and two chemistry department faculty members (Regina Stevens-Truss and Laura Lowe Furge) attended the recent West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference in Grand Rapids. The students were Carline Dugue ’12, Chelsea Wallace ’13, Nicholas Sweda ’12, Mara Livezey ’13, Michael Hicks ’12, Kelly Bresnahan ’12, Josh Abbott ’12, Amanda Bolles ’14, and Erran Briggs ’14. Hicks and Wallace are biology majors; the others are majoring in chemistry. They presented results of their summer and academic year research experiences, including Senior Individualized Project work for Dugue, Bresnahan, Sweda, and Abbott. More than 170 posters from colleges across West Michigan were part of the conference’s poster session, and some 400 people participated in the conference. Dugue’s research focused on semiconductor quantum dots and charge transfer; she worked with Western Michigan University professor Sherine Obare. Abbott’s work focused on the role of a specific liver enzyme (CYP2B6) in the way the body processes the cancer drug cyclophosphamide. He did this work in the lab of Professor Paul Hollenberg at the University of Michigan. Bresnahan completed her SIP at the University of Michigan laboratory of Professor James Woods. She worked on animal models for testing of molecules called cholinergic receptor agonists for aid in smoking cessation studies. The other six posters described research done at Kalamazoo College. Sweda presented ongoing studies from Professor Stevens-Truss’s lab on suramin selective inhibition of nitric oxide synthases, part of a chain of events that affects production of nitric oxide in the human body. An excess of nitric oxide is associated with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. This work is the basis of a manuscript in preparation with Sweda and Alyssa McNamara ’11 as co-authors. Wallace’s research (with Associate Professor of Biology Blaine Moore) showed that BCL-2 is able to rescue neuroblastoma cells from ethanol toxicity. Livezey, Hicks, Bolles, and Briggs each presented individual posters with results of three projects from Professor Furge’s lab on the interactions of inhibitors with human cytochrome P450 enzymes. These enzymes metabolize compounds, including medicines, in the liver, and the inhibition of those enzymes may influence the effectiveness of current and new medicines. The work presented by Bolles and Briggs is currently being prepared in a manuscript for publication with both students as co-authors along with Livezey. The posters presented by Hicks and Livezey are the basis of a current NIH grant renewal to support ongoing opportunities for student research in the Furge lab. In addition to the poster sessions, students attended several lectures and were able to meet with graduate school recruiters.

Four K Faculty Present at East Asian Studies Conference

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Rose Bundy, Japanese, was chair and organizer of a panel discussion at the Japan Study 50th Anniversary Conference: The Future of East Asian Studies at Liberal Arts Colleges. The conference took place at Earlham College in early October. The name of the panel presentation was “Passages to Asia: The Japanese Studies Curriculum–From Intro to Senior Seminar.” In addition to Bundy the panel included her fellow K professors Dennis Frost, history; Yue Hong, Chinese; and Noriko Sugimori, Japanese.

K Documentarian Dhera Strauss Cooks Up New “Kitchen Conversation”

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Kalamazoo College Video Specialist and Instructor Dhera Strauss
Dhera Strauss

Kalamazoo College Video Specialist and Instructor Dhera Strauss will show a new cut of her documentary “Kitchen Conversations” this Sunday Nov. 4 at 4 PM and 7 PM at WMU’s Little Theater, located on the corner of Oakland Dr. and Oliver Lane. “Kitchen Conversations” includes 13 separate segments, each profiling a Kalamazoo-area woman in her kitchen preparing a recipe that reminds her of her family. The documentary features several women with connections to K, including Professor of Sociology and Anthropology (Emerita) Marigene Arnold, Professor of German Language and Literature (Emerita) Margo Light, Library Acquisitions Technician Renata Schnelker, Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Jan Solberg, and President Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran. Sunday’s screening of Strauss’s documentary, which debuted in 2010, includes an additional 20 minutes that focuses on local baker Judy Sarkozy. The screening is a fundraiser for Sarkozy’s effort to reopen her business destroyed by a fire earlier this year. There will be a suggested donation of $10, but all contributions are welcomed.