Maxwell Rhames ’25 and Daniela Arias-Rotondo, Kalamazoo College’s Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science, are receiving national recognition for their three years of work together that culminated in Rhames’ Senior Integrated Project (SIP).
Arias-Rotondo’s synthetic inorganic chemistry lab works to find ways of converting light into energy. In Rhames’ SIP, that meant examining what alternative metals could possibly be used to make things like solar panels less expensive, one day assisting a global shift toward renewable energy.
“When you have some sort of inorganic complex that absorbs light, that light can get transformed into chemical energy in the form of electricity,” Rhames said. “A common example is with solar panels, but the metals that they use in them are rare, and as a result, incredibly expensive. We were looking at taking some cheaper metals that you could find anywhere in a much more sustainable way and asking whether they can work.”
For their efforts, the two have received an honorable mention in the 2024 Division of Inorganic Chemistry Award for Undergraduate Research, which recognizes research that students and faculty perform in tandem. The award, given through the American Chemical Society, has three divisions between national labs, research universities and institutions that primarily consist of undergraduates. Rhames and Arias-Rotondo were honored in the primarily-undergraduates category, which covers scientists from hundreds of schools across the country.
“The traditional photoactive metals are iridium and ruthenium, and we’re looking at manganese, which is the third-most abundant transition metal on Earth,” Rhames said. “In the state we use it in, it’s stable and nontoxic, so it’s a great alternative. We’re looking at how we can bridge the gap between saying, ‘this could be really cool,’ and actually getting it to where we could apply it in some of these areas.”
Arias-Rotondo said she and Rhames use spectroscopy to understand what kind of light the compounds they create absorb and what happens after they absorb it.
Maxwell Rhames ’25 and Daniela Arias-Rotondo, Kalamazoo College’s Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science, have received national recognition with an honorable mention in the 2024 Division of Inorganic Chemistry Award for Undergraduate Research, which recognizes research that students and faculty perform in tandem.
“One of the problems that we’re finding is that once our compounds absorb light and get to what we call an excited state, that excited state doesn’t last long enough yet for them to be useful,” she said. “But Max’s work has been instrumental because he was the first one in the group to make these kinds of compounds. Now that we’ve been able to understand their properties and investigate some of them, other students in our lab can understand how to make them better. We are making a name for ourselves by laying the groundwork for making these compounds.”
Rhames has discussed his SIP at the Inter-American Photochemical Society and American Chemical Society conferences, where his fellow scientists were enthused about his work on a national scale.
“That’s been the coolest thing, because when you put something out there, you don’t know what people are going to think of it,” he said. “And generally, their reactions have been super rewarding. I enjoy doing the work myself, but it’s even cooler to know that other people find it equally exciting. It’s an added bonus.”
Rhames won’t be the first or the last in his family to graduate from K when he walks the stage at Commencement in June. Both of his parents, Frank ’92 and Jody ’92, are alumni, and his sister, Claire ’27, is a current student. However, he’s clearly found his own path having performed research in Arias-Rotondo’s lab ever since his first year on campus. In addition, he will start a Ph.D. program at the University of Delaware in fall, and he hopes to one day serve as a faculty member at an institution like K.
“K is small, so you get to make a lot of good connections with your professors,” Rhames said. “I was three or four weeks into my first term as a college student, and all of a sudden, I’m in a lab doing the work with the research. There are no post-docs or graduate students. It is just the undergraduates and the faculty doing all of the work. That would’ve been a lot harder to do had I not gone to K.”
A new grant awarded to a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry will provide seed money for new research and support Kalamazoo College students performing lab work over the next two years.
Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo, affectionately known to her students as Dr. DAR, has earned an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund award. The honor bestows $50,000 to her work while backing her lab’s upcoming research regarding petroleum byproducts.
Arias-Rotondo’s lab traditionally develops molecules that absorb energy from light while transforming that energy into electricity. The grant will allow her and her students to take molecules they have designed to act as catalysts and unlock chemical transformations through a process called photoredox catalysis. In this case, those transformations involve petroleum byproducts and how they might be used.
“When you extract petroleum, you get crude oil, and crude oil gets refined to make things like diesel fuel and the gasoline that you put in your car,” Arias-Rotondo said. “The petroleum byproducts that come with it are compounds that we cannot use in our cars or to generate electricity. But if we can turn those molecules into plastics, pesticides or medicines, for example, we would add value to the byproducts. It’s a highly desirable research avenue because we can potentially turn this waste into something we can use.”
Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo, pictured with her lab students this summer, has earned an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund award. The honor bestows $50,000 to her work while backing her lab’s upcoming research regarding petroleum byproducts for the next two years.
The grant requires that at least 40% of the funds be used to support students. Some students currently working in Arias-Rotondo’s lab note how grateful they are, not only to work alongside her, but to be paid for their efforts thanks to similar grants. Will Tocco ’26, for example, said that being able to do summer lab work prepares him for classes and labs during the academic year and can set him apart on grad school applications when institutions look for research experience.
“The grants that Dr. DAR has received in the past have made it possible to be here this summer,” Tocco said. “They paid for me to attend the national American Chemical Society Conference this last spring and present a poster there. They have sponsored my research and all of the expenses that go along with that. They’re the reason why I’m able to be do this work.”
Unayza Anika ’26 added that the lab work reflects the kind of experience students can expect at K.
“It’s obviously rigorous, and it’s teaching me so much more than what I would have learned in classrooms,” Anika said. “It also involves a lot more personal attention that I can get from a faculty member who has a Ph.D. I’ve personally grown a lot.”
“What I really appreciate about this grant is how much of a focus there is on supporting students,” Arias-Rotondo said. “It’s going to help us give students the chance to be in the lab and not have to decide between that and affording something else. The grant helps them do exciting research, and they will learn a lot that’s not just about chemistry. It will also teach them how to conduct themselves in a lab, how to manage their time and how to think like scientists. That’s going to be super important for the future.”
When scientists perform research, what they discover is often proprietary and kept in close confidence until results are published or patented. Erin Somsel ’24, however, would rather share her research with the world.
Somsel, a biochemistry major at Kalamazoo College, is working on her Senior Integrated Project with Associate Professor of Chemistry Dwight Williams and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, which engages top students from about 25 global institutions in research through the Open Synthesis Network. Their combined efforts provide shared, open-source information, allowing entire teams to look into the molecules and compounds that present the most promise for developing medicines that fight neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).
NTDs are a diverse group of 20 conditions that disproportionately infect women and children in impoverished communities with devastating health, social and economic consequences. Many are vector-borne with animal reservoirs and complex life cycles that complicate their public-health control. Plus, drug companies often don’t see the benefits of helping impoverished communities that are less profitable.
The open-source initiative, though, is more interested in cooperative work and says its participating researchers have developed 12 treatments for six deadly diseases, potentially saving millions of lives.
“That’s appealing to me because there are scientists from everywhere that work on this project,” Somsel said. “I think that’s a cool way of getting everyone involved in the scientific community to come up with a solution to a big problem.”
Somsel hopes her work will contribute to a treatment for a seventh affliction, Chagas disease. The inflammatory condition is most common in South America, Central America and Mexico with rare cases in the southern United States. It spreads through the feces of a parasite often called the kissing bug, as it damages the heart and other vital organs when the bug bites humans.
“A lot of the work on the drugs for Chagas disease was done in the 1960s, so there’s an urgent need for new ones,” Somsel said. “Chagas has two phases, acute and chronic. The acute phase has common symptoms such as fever, headache and fatigue, but if it turns chronic, it can cause cardiomyopathy and serious gastrointestinal problems. The drugs only work in the acute phase, so if it’s not caught, it’s life-threatening. There’s also no vaccine against Chagas disease.”
In the lab, IC50 values represent the concentrations at which substances inhibit parasites through biological and biochemical processes. The hope is to find IC50 values through molecules and compounds that warrant further research.
“I’ve been working on optimizing our processes and I got the procedure down so that we could start generating some of the compounds that we wanted to,” Somsel said. “The next step is to continue building the library of the chemicals we want to make and send them into the Open Synthesis Network, where it will test them for the activity against the parasites.”
Erin Somsel ’24 hopes her research will contribute to a treatment for Chagas disease, an inflammatory condition most common in South America, Central America and Mexico with rare cases in the southern United States.
Somsel first was introduced to NTD research when she was on study abroad in Costa Rica. While there she studied Latin American health care systems in an environment that challenged her to grow.
Somsel first was introduced to NTD research when she was on study abroad in Costa Rica. While there she studied Latin American health care systems, including Costa Rica’s, in an environment that challenged her to grow.
“I think K has a unique culture of pushing students beyond their comfort zone,” she said. “I don’t think that I would have had that experience at any other place.”
Now, with that experience—plus a K-Plan that involves student organizations such as the Health Professions Society and the Sisters in Science, athletics through the women’s soccer team, and academics as a teaching assistant for introductory chemistry—Somsel feels like she’s prepared to one day succeed in medical school, where she will continue pursuing lab research. Hopefully, that will involve further research involving NTDs.
“Success for me used to be going to class, getting A’s and stuff like that,” Somsel said. “Then, I started working in the lab. I found that there are many little things that build up to success. When I had a reaction that wasn’t successful, it was easy for me to say, ‘I was unsuccessful today.’ But Dr. Williams helped me put it in a different perspective. He could say, ‘No, you were unsuccessful in generating this compound, but you were successful in realizing this solvent didn’t work, so we can try something else and move forward.’ I think that has really shaped me as a student. It helped me understand that if at first something doesn’t work for me, I’m going to keep trying and persisting to find something that does.”
When progress is made in the fight against neurological afflictions such as ALS, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, students such as Vivian Schmidt ’25 often are on the frontlines of research.
Schmidt, a biology and psychology double major with a concentration in neuroscience at Kalamazoo College, is having a cutting-edge experience this summer at the University of Michigan. She is working for 10 weeks in the institution’s Summer Intensive Research Experience in Neuroscience (SIREN) program, a highly desirable opportunity that accepts only about 20 applicants each year out of hundreds. As a bonus, she’s directly working with Michigan faculty such as K alumna Elizabeth Tank ’03, an assistant research scientist in neurology.
The initiative is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, which also provides Schmidt with a stipend and on-campus housing.
“It’s surreal to think that everything I did in high school and my first two years at K led to this opportunity,” Schmidt said. “I’ve met a lot of incredibly witty, smart and established professionals in their field, who have done phenomenal things. It definitely has solidified my desire to come here for graduate school, as well. It’s been amazing to get to know the faculty members and the culture of the program here.”
SIREN research this summer involves a range of topics within neuroscience. Schmidt’s specific project is investigating what goes wrong with a protein that has ties to ALS and dementia to understand the underlying causes of the conditions. The hope is that the science will one day reveal therapeutic options that assist treatment.
“Even the failures are exciting now because I’ve realized they tell me this one thing didn’t work,” Schmidt said. “I ask, ‘Why didn’t this work?’ as opposed to getting down on myself. The daily successes have involved my mental attitude and keeping up my enthusiasm, especially in such a long program, and ultimately, the overall goal is presenting my research.”
In a way, such an opportunity for Schmidt could have been predicted. She’s been interested in studying how people think since high school, and her biology and chemistry classes helped her develop a passion for biological-based research rather than clinical approaches to psychology.
“I wanted to be the one getting my hands dirty in the lab,” she said. “I wanted to be the one who tries to figure out why something failed and then try it again. I’ve known since my first year in high school that I wanted a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and it’s something I’ve been gunning for since.”
Schmidt has received a lot of encouragement from K faculty and staff such as Professor of Biology Blaine Moore, Director of Biology Labs Anne Engh and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo. Moore, however, was the one Schmidt conversed with even before she arrived at K. He, Arias-Rotondo, and Engh have written countless letters of recommendation on her behalf.
Vivian Schmidt ’25, a biology and psychology double major with a concentration in neuroscience, presents her summer research at the University of Michigan.
“I did my apprenticeship with Dr. Moore in the spring after he was phenomenally supportive throughout my first year, so I made him my official academic advisor,” she said. “He’s been great at guiding me with which classes to take and pushing me to do what he knows I’m capable of. I might not 100% believe in myself all the time, but I know he believes in me. Kalamazoo College is better for him being there.”
Study abroad opportunities and a wide range of subjects within her reach were big reasons why she chose K.
“The fact that I could do a double major and still have room to take classes that had absolutely nothing to do with neuroscience was a huge draw,” she said. “My first year I took jazz explorations and Hindu traditions and they were some of my favorites. I don’t think I would have been able to do that at another school.”
Thanks to a well-rounded K-Plan, Schmidt also plays on the women’s lacrosse team, participates in an astrophotography- and astronomy-focused student organization she co-founded called Konstellation, and plans programming for first-generation students like herself through the Intercultural Center. But research will always be her focus at K, throughout graduate school, and hopefully, in her professional life.
“I’ve been tossing around a few ideas, because with a Ph.D., I could go an industrial route or go into teaching, or I could work somewhere like the Van Andel Institute, where I could just be a research scientist,” she said. “I’ve always had a bit of an interest in teaching, mentorship and explaining things to people, too. At this moment, I’m thinking I would love to be a professor at an institution where I can teach and do research. That would be ideal, but no matter what, as long as research is involved, I’m going to be happy.”
Rachel Kramer ’23 in the Centre for Research in Applied Biology (CeRAB) at UENR with Ankrah, Babae, Kramer and Rabi Baidoo from left to right.
Kramer collecting samples from schoolchildren.
Kramer and friends sharing a home-cooked meal by Ankrah during the “going-away party” they all threw for her at the end of the summer.
With the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11, Kalamazoo College commonly celebrates the accomplishments of scientists such as Rachel Kramer ’23.
The day, first marked by the United Nations in 2015, encourages women scientists, and targets equal access to and participation in science for women and girls. Such a day is desired because U.N. statistics show that fewer than 30 percent of scientific researchers in the world are women and only about 30 percent of all female students select fields in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) to pursue in their higher education. Only about 22 percent of the professionals in cutting edge fields such as artificial intelligence are women, and representation among women is especially low professionally in fields such as information and communication technology, natural science, mathematics, statistics and engineering.
Kramer often found herself comforting community members like this child as they gave their blood samples for tropical disease research.
Rachel Kramer ’23 stands with a NeTroDis Research team at the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR). From left to right in the bottom row are Dr. Kenneth Bentum Otabil, Kramer, Ms. Blessing Ankrah, and Theophilus Nti Babae. From left to right in the top row are Charles Addai and Emmanual Bart-Plange.
Kramer enjoying fresh Ghanaian coconut after Sunday service.
However, Kramer—a biochemistry major with a concentration in community and global health and a minor in Spanish—is bucking that trend. She will attend the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine in July 2023. Plus, she completed 10 weeks of research last summer investigating health inequities in Ghana, Africa, while collecting data and researching Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD’s) for her Senior Integrated Project (SIP).
The lead up to her SIP opportunity began two summers ago when she decided to get into volunteer work abroad through International Volunteer Head Quarters (IVHQ). At that time, she spent two weeks in Ghana, where she performed health care outreach by providing wound care to people in remote areas under the supervision of local health professionals.
Kramer, the NeTroDis Team and their study clinician, Dr. Vera Darko (far right), on the far left meet the president of the regional hospital (middle) to inform him of their research.
Ankrah and Otabil introduce Kramer to UENR’s Dean of Science at UENR, Professor SF Gyasi.
Kramer and her host mother, Blessing Ankrah.
While she was there, she saw people with parasitic diseases which she later found out were considered to be NTD’s. Such diseases are of special interest to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO). In fact, the two organizations have a roadmap for eradicating NTD’s by 2030, which involves working with local researchers in endemic regions to collect data to inform policy to better protect and serve the people affected by NTD’s.
“I saw children 5 years old and younger with these ulcers half an inch deep in their ankles and feet,” Kramer said. “It struck me and I knew that these things shouldn’t be happening.”
Even before returning to Michigan, Kramer knew she wanted to go back to Ghana and develop her SIP there as her way of helping to solve the health issues she witnessed. She just didn’t know what might provide that opportunity.
Kramer in front of Kalamazoo College’s Dow Science Center, holding her 101-page SIP just before turning it in.
Kramer and UENR students and staff packed into vans like this with all their gear to travel to fieldwork destinations.
A microscopic view of a participant sample.
After several random conversations asking people, including K alumni, about anyone doing research there, Kramer reached out through Twitter to Blessing Ankrah, a researcher with the NeTroDis Research Group, a non-governmental agency at the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR) in Sunyani, Bono Region of Ghana.
“Two weeks later, she ended up responding and said she’d be happy to collaborate,” Kramer said. “We started talking on Zoom and WhatsApp, and she decided to have me work on a project where they were updating the prevalence rates of two neglected tropical diseases called schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiasis.”
Terrain such as the one pictured were roads teams had to walk several miles on in order to reach some of the communities. This contributes to why diseases are considered neglected. They are difficult for researchers and health personnel to reach.
Multilingual UENR students are seen translating the research forms from English to Twi so the community members, who speak Twi, could participate in the research.
Kramer celebrating Doris Berkoh’s (professor of Biochemistry at UENR) birthday with other UENR Biological Science faculty and staff.
According to the CDC, schistosomiasis parasites live in some types of freshwater snails, and humans become infected when their skin touches contaminated water. Health-care professionals diagnose schistosomiasis through urine and stool samples. Within days of becoming infected, patients typically develop a rash or itchy skin. Fever, chills, cough and muscle aches can begin within a month or two of infection. If left untreated, this disease can become fatal.
Soil-transmitted helminthiasis, the CDC says, targets human intestines as parasites’ eggs are passed in feces. If an infected person defecates outside—near bushes, in a garden or on a field, for example—parasitic eggs are deposited on soil. People can ingest the parasites when they eat fruits and vegetables that have not been carefully cooked, washed or peeled. Some infections can cause a range of health problems, including abdominal pain, diarrhea, blood and protein loss, rectal prolapse, and slowed or stunted physical and cognitive growth. Similar to schistosomiasis, if untreated, this disease can become fatal.
Group photo of Kramer and the junior year biological science students on the field trip to Mole National Park
Kramer celebrating Cultural Day at a local Montessori.
Kramer standing with members of a community NeTroDis researchers visited after watching them construct a hand-made xylophone with wooden planks, leaves and a hole in the ground.
Ankrah became a host mom to Kramer as both worked on the project to update and investigate the relevance, intensity and risk factors of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiasis in selected rural and hard-to-reach communities in the Bono and Bono East regions of Ghana. The opportunity was funded by the Hough SIP Grant and the Collins Fellowship through Student Projects Abroad (SPA) funding, both of which were through Kalamazoo College. .
“This summer was an experience where I was not only a researcher, but I was also a student and a family member,” Kramer said. “Blessing was able to show me what the food was like, what the people were like, what the culture was like and it was just an amazing life experience.”
Kramer with UENR students in the savanna on the field trip to Mole National Park.
Kramer in the Centre for Research in Applied Biology (CeRAB) at UENR microscopically analyzing samples.
Bringing clothes for community members during fieldwork visits.
Yet research definitely remained the purpose of her visit. For the first three weeks, it was necessary for the researchers to perform paperwork during business hours to ensure the ethical approval of the project by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) committees at UENR. During the evening hours, Ankrah introduced Kramer to her family and friends including host brother Lord Owusu Ansah; the university’s president, vice president and dean of science; and regional hospital leaders.
When the five-week field work began, Kramer and her fellow researchers traveled to eight isolated communities that had as few as five and as many as 200 residents to collect socio demographic and qualitative data along with urine and stool samples.
NeTroDis team walking on the dirt road to get to the communities. From left to right Theophilus Nti Babae, Otabil, Divine and Kramer.
Kramer at one of the community sites for field work.
Kramer with Ankrah for their daily “pre-work selfie.”
“We would get up at 4:30 a.m. and ride in a packed van for about three hours,” Kramer said. “When we arrived to the communities, many times we would have to walk a distance with all of our gear. Some of these communities were only a few households and are located so far from public roads, and that’s why these diseases are considered neglected. It took us two hours to walk to one of the communities on foot and there was no way to get there with a car. Since there are so few people living in these remote places, there’s no way the government would fund roads to these communities.”
After traveling back to the UENR campus from the field, the researchers stored their samples in freezers before resting for a few hours and then returning to the lab around 7 p.m. in the evening when they analyzed up to hundreds of samples. The immediacy was imperative despite their long days because the urine and stool samples would go bad within 24 to 48 hours.
Kramer standing with her head researcher, Dr. Kenneth Bentum Otabil.
Rachel Kramer exchanging a gift with the vice chancellor of UENR after introducing NeTroDis’s summer research project to him.
Kramer with children at local market.
After the field work, Kramer’s biggest roles were inputting data, helping with the preparation of samples, and microscopic analysis of the specimens.
“Once we got our data from all eight communities, we compiled all of it and I worked with a data analyst at the university who helped me compile it to get our overall prevalence rates and associate the risk factors to the positive cases,” Kramer said.
This work became the basis for her SIP.
“This was the first time I met someone in Ghana who was older than me yet shorter and we had so much fun dancing together when I visited this community,” Kramer said.
A research participant dressed in beautiful Ghanaian clothing gives her blood sample for research.
Kramer with Ankrah for their daily “pre-work selfie.”
“Now that my written SIP has been submitted, all that’s left to do is present my SIP at the annual Chemistry and Biochemistry SIP Symposium during the spring trimester and then wait to find out whether I attain honors from the faculty for my work,” Kramer said. “So many people questioned why I decided to do something so big for my SIP since I have already been accepted to medical school. But just because I have been accepted doesn’t mean I need to take a step back, so I decided to pursue a passion instead. I did this because I have seen these diseases firsthand and how disproportionately they affect people of low socio-economic status in tropical regions. I was emotionally driven to take part in the global movement to end the neglect. Additionally, I knew that this opportunity would enhance my cultural competence which can help me be a better physician to people in the future. Eventually, I’d like to be a study clinician in similar studies and even create the policies that can protect and serve people. With this foundational-level research under my belt, I am motivated to continue my research focus on NTD’s in medical school.”
And this might not be the last of her research outside of medical school.
“I’m still in contact with my host mom,” Kramer said. “I have a number of people in Ghana I text every week just to talk about various things like the projects they’re working on. Currently, they have two new projects that are going to be funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation regarding an NTD called Onchocerciasis, which is transmitted through biting black flies. I asked Blessing if it is possible for me to work remotely while I’m in medical school on those projects, and she said I probably could, but it is also possible that I could go back to Ghana during this upcoming summer to join their new projects in projects in person. Overall, I loved being abroad and how it opened up my eyes to the world and cross-cultural differences. Being a future physician, I was introduced to the atrocities of Neglected Tropical Diseases and I saw just how invaluable being a part of the team that is working to end the neglect really is.”
Richard J. Cook and Teresa M. Lahti have established an endowment for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity to facilitate faculty-student collaborative work.
Kalamazoo College students participating in faculty-advised research or creative projects now have access to dedicated funding thanks to a $250,000 gift from a couple who previously served as members of the College’s faculty and administration.
The Richard J. Cook and Teresa M. Lahti Endowment for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity was established to facilitate faculty-student collaborative work. The fund provides stipends, materials and essential project-related travel assistance to students engaged in such research or creative activity.
The fund began awarding grants in 2020, providing support to projects as varied as chemistry research related to solar energy production and efficiency, the study of the physical structure of viruses and a poetry collection exploring themes of identity.
“A gift such as this one improves equity for students with financial need who want to take advantage of these collaborative opportunities—particularly in the summer months, when students are also working and saving for the coming academic year,” Provost Danette Ifert Johnson said. “We are so grateful to Richard and Terry for supporting what is often a transformative experience for K students.”
After earning a bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton University, Richard Cook joined the faculty at Kalamazoo College in 1973, eventually serving as chair of the division of natural sciences and mathematics. In 1987, he received one of Kalamazoo’s highest honors, the Lucasse Fellowship for Excellence in Scholarship. He was named provost of the College in 1989 and served for seven years in that role before being named president of Allegheny College in 1996. Cook left Allegheny in 2008 and joined Lahti Search Consultants. Today he is a higher education governance and leadership consultant with Cook Leadership Partnership.
Teresa Lahti was the dean of admission at K from 1991-1996, where she helped to lift K’s national profile on the admission stage. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of Saint Benedict and completed graduate work at the University of Notre Dame. Lahti began her career at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University in Minnesota as an admissions counselor and later served as director of recruitment at the University of Miami in Florida and director of admissions at Agnes Scott College in Georgia before joining K. She founded Lahti Search Consultants in 1997, an executive search firm that specialized in placing enrollment leaders at more than 250 colleges and universities.
“We know from firsthand experience the life-changing difference scholarship support and dedicated mentors can make in a student’s trajectory,” Cook and Lahti said. “It is a true privilege to support K’s longstanding commitment to its nationally recognized student-faculty research program. We are confident that future students will benefit from the excitement of discovery through faculty-guided projects as previous generations of students have.”
Though Kalamazoo College chemistry professor Tom Smith has had 40 years to devise just the right formula for ensuring the success of his students, they’ll tell you that he had it from the very start. Alumni — led by two who were part of the first class Smith taught in the 1978-79 school year, Chris Bodurow and Bob Weinstein, both ’79 — are in the midst of a fundraising effort that has endowed the Thomas J. Smith Student Research Fellowship in Chemistry. The fund honors the retiring Smith, the Dorothy H. Heyl Professor of Chemistry, by supporting an initiative he chose, and which is close to his heart: independent summer research.
As Tom Smith, the Kalamazoo College Dorothy H. Heyl Professor of Chemistry, retires after 40 years as a student favorite, some of his former students are honoring him by endowing an independent summer student research fellowship in his name.
With Min Soo Kim ’19 designated as the first recipient, the endowment drive is entering its second phase. Bodurow is personally pledging a match of up to $20,000 in contributions with the goal of expanding the number of students who receive the fellowship each summer, a priority for the College as its new strategic plan re-emphasizes the K-Plan tenets of experiential education and independent scholarship.
Testifying to the devotion Smith inspires: He has been designated an Alpha Lambda Delta National Honorary Society Favorite Teacher by first-year students 13 times since 2003. In addition, he has directed the Senior Individualized Projects of 70 students, was named a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Scholar and was awarded the Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for Excellence in Scholarship or Creative Work and the Dr. Winthrop S. and Lois A. Hudson Award for Outstanding Contributions in Research at Kalamazoo College.
It doesn’t take a list of awards, however, to understand the influence Smith has had on students, and the profound sense of appreciation it has engendered in the more than a dozen alumni who have contributed some $130,000 for the endowment.
Bodurow and Weinstein were seniors when Smith arrived at the College, fresh from post-doctoral work at Caltech. They said Smith immediately took on a role that went far beyond just teaching chemistry.
“He really had a very strong propensity to encourage us in our studies and in our post-Kalamazoo College strategies in our lives. He quickly identified students he thought ought to pursue graduate degrees and encouraged us,” said Bodurow, who went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton University and has had a distinguished career in drug research. Now retired from Eli Lilly and Company, where she was senior research director, external sourcing, for the Medicines Development Unit, she is a member of the board of the American Chemical Society and is president of PharmaDOQS, a consultancy.
“Tom was very deliberate about understanding our strengths and passions and directing us,” said Bodurow. “It was all because of his strong commitment to launching us, and he made sure we had a strong post-Kalamazoo plan. It was quite extraordinary. If you talk to anyone who has had Tom as a professor, they will tell you a similar story.”
Weinstein does.
“He helped us understand what it meant to go to grad school and how to get to grad school. He was telling us what it was like and challenging us with projects,” said Weinstein, who earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is president and CEO of Robertet USA, an arm of the French-owned maker of flavors, fragrances and natural raw materials. “It didn’t take Tom Smith very long to say, ‘This is what the College is about: I will prepare these students for graduate school or medical school and really dedicate myself to helping them.’ ”
Smith, he said, “was the engine behind me. To be able to contribute to his legacy at K is a privilege that I am proud to be able to do. I honestly believe that nothing I have accomplished would have been possible without Tom Smith and K.”
Kalamazoo College President Jorge G. Gonzalez said few things are more meaningful to professors than to have former students credit them for their successes. To have them go a step further and fund an endowment in their name, he said, “is both an honor and an affirmation that you have achieved the goal motivating every educator, and that is to make a real difference in your students’ lives.”
Smith called it “humbling.”
“You think you’re getting your job done and then you discover decades later that the impact has lasted,” said Smith, an aficionado of hiking and movies, who described the honor as a fitting capstone for his career.
“So often when I say goodbye to students, I tell them, ‘Go out and make the world a better place,’ ” he said. “It becomes a lifelong interaction. That’s why we do this.”
To contribute to the Thomas J. Smith Student Research Fellowship in Chemistry, or to discuss creating an endowment in the name of another favorite faculty or staff member, contact Kalamazoo College Vice President for Advancement Al J. DeSimone at 269.337.7292 or Al.DeSimone@kzoo.edu.
Péter Érdi, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies, is the co-editor of a new book titled “Computational Neurology and Psychiatry.” He also is the co-author — along with two K alumni, Takumi Matsuzawa ’16 and Tibin John ’15 — of a paper included in that book. The paper is titled “Connecting Epilepsy and Alzheimer’s Disease: Modeling of Normal and Pathological Rhythmicity and Synaptic Plasticity Related to Amyloidβ (Aβ) Effects.”
Péter Érdi is the co-editor of a new book titled “Computational Neurology and Psychiatry.”
Sometimes seeing more is a matter of new ways of looking. Such “new ways of looking” include the emerging scientific fields of computational neurology and computational psychiatry. The key word is “computational.” Researchers apply math and computer science to create computer models that simulate brain structures and brain activities associated with specific disorders (epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease, for example). Such simulations — and new techniques of analyzing the copious amount of data that emerges from such simulations — have the potential to reveal elements of brain structure and function associated with disease and disorders, elements that have heretofore been a mystery. In other words, these “new ways of looking” may result in seeing what’s never been seen before.
Computer modeling also offers advantages of cost and convenience compared to older ways (animal experimentation and laboratory set-up) of trying to model and see brain structure and (mal)function.
A book that pioneers these new scientific fields is exciting and important, says Péter: “Adopting advanced computational methods such as modeling and data processing raises hopes that one day we will more effectively treat neurological and psychiatric disorders.”
In other news, Péter has been appointed vice president for membership of the International Neural Network Societies.
The Modern Language Association’s MLA Field Bibliographer Newsletter includes a profile of a Distinguished Indexer who is none other than Kalamazoo College’s own Joe Fugate, professor emeritus of German studies and director emeritus of the Center for International Programs. Indexers and bibliographers are indispensable to the art and science of scholarship in all fields. The MLA article notes that Joe has been a field indexer longer than any other contributor, enriching the coverage in the German literature section for almost fifty years, adding thousands of citations to the MLA International Bibliography. He has also served as a member of and consultant to the Bibliography Advisory Committee. He was awarded an MLA International Bibliography Fellowship for the years 2011 to 2014. Much of the article is in Joe’s own voice. He says, “My tenure as a bibliographer has differed from that of any other bibliographer I have known because for almost 30 years while maintaining my faculty status, I held an administrative post in our study abroad program, including 18 as director.
“I was fortunate because my faculty interests–German language and literature, especially of the 18th century and in particular J. G. Herder–and my administrative post complemented each other. My frequent overseas trips visiting universities on three continents enabled me to establish personal contact with a number of foreign scholars who shared my academic interests and to perfect my fluency in other languages. The fact that my name appeared in the International Bibliography helped immensely in establishing these contacts.
“Over the years I have witnessed a number of changes in the production of the bibliography. When I first became a contributor all entries were typed or hand written on three by five slips of paper (some of which I still have in my files) and sent to MLA headquarters. These slips were replaced by the color-coded sheets which likewise were completed by hand or typed and then submitted.
“Now everything is on the computer. Traditionalist that I am however, I continue to miss the printed edition. I am sure that the MLA staff was relieved when they no longer had to deal with handwritten entries. Looking back I recall with pleasure the yearly meetings of the bibliographers with the staff at the annual convention. The gathering not only gave us an opportunity to discuss bibliographical matters but also to get to know each other personally. One of our colleagues, a contract interpreter for Russian with the State Department, would enliven our meetings with stories about her experiences with visiting Russians and their habit of proposing frequent toasts of vodka. When she was asked how she handled this, she replied that she tried to stand next to a plant into which she emptied her vodka. She never did tell us what this did to the plant.
“It was my privilege to serve on the Bibliography Advisory Committee. One issue we discussed at length was the lack of recognition as a scholarly and professional activity of being a bibliographer. In this connection I was able to cite one of my colleagues, now retired but still writing and publishing, who proclaimed for all to hear that my work as a bibliographer made his and other scholars’ possible. There are many to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for making my activity as a bibliographer an interesting and enriching experience: those who originally accepted me as a bibliographer, the heads of the bibliography department at the MLA, the section heads and the MLA staff with whom I have worked together and continue to work with even today.”
Rob Dunn ’97 is at it again; it being another citizen-science project (or two). And it (or they) are the subject of a fun and wonderful piece by Nicola Twilley, “What’s Lurking in Your Showerhead,” that appears in the December 8 issue of the New Yorker magazine.
Rob is an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University. Twilley is one of 500 participants in his lab’s Showerhead Microbiome Project. Those volunteers (in Europe and the United States) swab the gunk in their showerheads and send the samples Rob’s lab. Twilley found it a tad gross, but Rob wonders if it’s a good thing–those microorganisms in our showerheads. Turns out our bodies are full of other bodies–we depend on them. In fact, those other bodies’ cells (in or on us!) may outnumber our own, making me more other than myself. Wow! Whether or not what’s in our showerheads is good (or not so good) for us remains to be tested. First we have to see what’s in there in order to ask the right questions. Rob’s full of those; he’s a K grad. He’s also interested in the effect (for good or ill) on our “showerdough” of different water treatment processes.
Please forgive that “showerdough” malapropism; there’s a reason for it. Rob’s second current citizen-science project is all about the affect of microorganisms on sourdough and, ultimately on the taste of sourdough bread–across space and time. Some really interesting things may be going on there! Read Twilley’s article to find out. Citizen-science is nothing new to the Dunn lab. He’s done projects on belly button lint, human facial mites, insects in the kitchen, and household dust. Robs the author of three popular science books and was featured (“The Ant on Aldebaran”) in the Fall 2015 LuxEsto.
The Modern Language Association’s MLA Field Bibliographer Newsletter includes a profile of a Distinguished Indexer who is none other than Kalamazoo College’s own Joe Fugate, professor emeritus of German studies and director emeritus of the Center for International Programs. Indexers and bibliographers are indispensable to the art and science of scholarship in all fields. The MLA article notes that Joe has been a field indexer longer than any other contributor, enriching the coverage in the German literature section for almost fifty years, adding thousands of citations to the MLA International Bibliography. He has also served as a member of and consultant to the Bibliography Advisory Committee. He was awarded an MLA International Bibliography Fellowship for the years 2011 to 2014. Much of the article is in Joe’s own voice. He says, “My tenure as a bibliographer has differed from that of any other bibliographer I have known because for almost 30 years while maintaining my faculty status, I held an administrative post in our study abroad program, including 18 as director.