Emily Stillman’s K classmates and friends helped dedicate a lamppost on campus in her honor on June 5.
On the afternoon of June 5, friends and family of Emily Stillman ’15 gathered to dedicate a lamppost on the K campus in remembrance of the Kalamazoo College sophomore whose life was claimed by bacterial meningitis in February 2014.
The lamppost is situated on the main walkway near Olds-Upton Hall facing the steps leading to Mandelle Hall. A plaque with Emily’s name has been affixed to the post so students and other members of the campus community can easily see it as they pass by.
“As I hurry off to class or rush to meet others, I’ll be reminded,” said Bryan Olert ’15, a friend of Emily, during a dedication ceremony organized by K Chaplain Liz Candido ’00 and Vice President for Student Development and Dean of Students Sarah Westfall.
A lamp is perceived as a perfect embodiment of the bright, jovial, and vibrant character of Emily Stillman whose presence was hard to miss, according to some of her friends.
“You just feel her when she walks into a room,” said Nicole Caddow ’15. “You just know Emily Stillman is there.”
During the dedication ceremony, Olert and others took turns reciting pieces depicting the significance of the lamppost and how it conveys the memories they shared with their dear friend.
“When I see the lamppost, I will remember how Emily’s life illuminated those around her,” read Skylar Young ’15, a close friend of Emily.
Jared Grimer ’15 added, “The lamppost is a perfect representation of Emily’s radiant personality. She brought light and warmth into a world that can at times be dark and cold.”
Emily’s parents, Alicia and Michael Stillman, were at the ceremony with her two siblings Zachery and Karly Stillman. Since Emily’s death, the Stillmans have embarked on an awareness campaign by providing information on bacterial meningitis here in the United States and Canada. They founded the Emily Stillman Foundation to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated against meningitis and also inform people about the signs and symptoms of the disease.
“We are working to raise awareness of meningococcal disease and organ donation while keeping Emily’s legacy alive. We advocate meningococcal vaccinations,” reads the description on the Foundation’s Facebook page.
After her death, Emily’s parents also donated her organs through the Michigan Gift of Life Center, eventually helping to save at least five lives.
Janice Brown (left), Kalamazoo Promise, and Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran, Kalamazoo College
Beginning in the fall of 2015 Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS) students may use the Kalamazoo Promise Scholarship to attend Kalamazoo College as well as 14 other private colleges that are members of the Michigan Colleges Alliance (MCA). The news was announced on Tuesday at a press conference sponsored by the Kalamazoo Promise and the MCA.
The Promise was launched in 2005 and provides a four-year scholarship to KPS graduates who reside in the district and attend KPS through high school. The addition of the 15 MCA member institutions to the 43 Michigan public colleges and universities increases the number of Promise eligible schools to 58 throughout the state. In addition to K, MCA members include Adrian College, Albion College, Alma College, Andrews University, Aquinas College, Calvin College, Hillsdale College, University of Detroit Mercy, Hope College, Madonna University, Marygrove College, Olivet College, Siena Heights University, and Spring Arbor University.
For KPS students who enroll at MCA schools the tuition and fees will be fully and jointly funded by the Kalamazoo Promise and the MCA member institution. The Kalamazoo Promise will fund at the level of the undergraduate average tuition and fees for the College of Literature, Science and Arts at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). The MCA member institution will cover any difference between that amount and the amount of its yearly tuition and fees.
At a May dinner in the Hicks Center Kalamazoo College celebrated the 2014 Kalamazoo County high school graduates who earned Heyl Scholarships for Kalamazoo College (science and math) or Western Michigan University (nursing). The scholarship covers tuition, book costs, and room charges. The 2014 Heyl scholars include (l-r): front row—Rachel Chang, Fiona Beaton, Emily Fletcher, Amber Salome; back row—Jacob Naranjo, Peter Rossi, Jager Hartman, and Abhay Goel. Beaton will attend WMU; the other seven will begin their undergraduate studies at K in September. Not pictured is Alexandria Oswalt, who also will attend K. (Photo by Anthony Dugal Photography)
Veteran journalist Ray Suarez will deliver the 2014 Commencement address at Kalamazoo College on Sunday June 15, in a ceremony beginning at 1:00 p.m. on the campus Quad. Suarez will address approximately 300 members of the Class of 2014 and receive an honorary degree (Doctor of Humane Letters) from the College. Ms. Xinyu Hu ’14 will also address the graduates in her role as senior speaker.
The event is free and open to the public. The College sets up about 3,000 chairs on the Quad, but guests are invited to bring a bag chair or a blanket to stretch out on the grass. The weatherman says no rain! But just in case, Anderson Athletic Center on Academy is the alternate site. Unfortunately, the gym can only accommodate the graduates, some of their family members, and K administrators/faculty, and we use a ticketing process for that. Parking will be in high demand, so give yourself extra time.
For those unable to attend, K Commencement will be livestreamed.
Suarez is the permanent host of the Al Jazeera America daily program “Inside Story.” He joined the new American news channel in November 2013 after an extensive television and radio career in which he excelled at delivering, as Al Jazeera America president Kate O’Brian put it, “compelling coverage of the most challenging news stories and events with objectivity and depth, punctuated by Ray’s own brand of thoughtful analysis. That’s exactly what ‘Inside Story’ is all about.”
Suarez came from PBS’ “NewsHour,” where he worked from 1999 to 2013, most recently as its chief national correspondent. He also served as the lead correspondent for the program’s global health coverage, reporting on some of the world’s most threatening health crises from Africa, Latin America and Asia. Before joining PBS, he hosted National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” for six years.
The Brooklyn native who now lives in Washington, D.C. is the author of the critically acclaimed “Latino Americans,” the companion book to the PBS documentary series of the same name, published in September 2013. He also is the author of “The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America” and “The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration” and has contributed to several other books.
Mara Richman presented research at the North America Society for the Study of Personality Disorders.
Mara Richman ’15 has built an impressive scientific résumé in three short undergraduate years–and she has yet to reach her Senior Individualized Project (SIP) term!
During her study abroad in Budapest, Hungary the psychology major collaborated with Dr. Zsolt Unoka on research in depression and borderline personality disorder. She presented that work, titled “Mental state decoding deficit in major depression and borderline personality disorder: a meta-analysis,” at the North America Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. Think the age of David (when he confronted Goliath) or of Joan of Arc … Mara was the youngest presenter at NASSPD! And she will be one of the youngest oral presenters at the prestigious International Congress on Borderline Personality Disorder and Allied Disorders (Rome, Italy), where her paper was accepted and where she will detail the meta-analysis she completed with Unoka. Their research also has been submitted in manuscript form to Clinical Psychology Review.
To date, Mara has six manuscripts published or in review for publication on research into schizophrenia, drug courts, and borderline personality disorder. She has presented research (or had research accepted for presentation) at Stanford University, the Association for Psychological Science, the Midwestern Psychological Association, the Mid America Undergraduate Research Conference, and the Michigan Undergraduate Psychology Conference. And she will present her work at the American Psychological Association in August. Most of this BEFORE she begins in earnest her SIP work. That will happen this summer at Harvard University Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry under mentor ship of one of the world’s foremost experts on borderline personality disorder, Dr. Mary Zanarini.
Given her youth and her accomplishments so far, it may not be too surprising that Mara will graduate after her senior fall term. She hopes to work in a lab for nine months or so and then apply to graduate school. She plans to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and focus her research on borderline personality disorder.
Kalamazoo College has won the coveted Klein Cup for the fourth consecutive year. “If we keep this up, perhaps the award should be re-named the K Kup,” said John Fink, the Rosemary K. Brown Professor in Mathematics and Computer Science. The Klein Cup honors the first place finisher in the annual Lower Michigan Mathematics Competition (LMMC). This year’s math dust-up took place a Lawrence Technological University (Southfield, Mich.) and featured 20 teams from nine schools. K sent three teams that placed first, second, and tenth. Not bad. And since half the first place team and all of the second place team are underclassmen, the prospects for next year look good. K Kup, indeed! This year’s K math hornets included: first place team–Umang Varma and Tibin John; second place team–Raoul Wadhwa, Ngoc (Van) Truong, and Raj Bhagat; tenth place team–Sajan Silwal, Mehmet Kologlu, and Alex Townsend.
A scene from PEER GYNT (photo by Emily Salswedel ’16)
It’s grand finale time for Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College’s golden anniversary. To close its 50th season, Festival Playhouse presents Colin Teevan’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Thursday through Sunday, May 15-18, in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse.
Guest Director Todd Espeland has set the play in a contemporary punk rock club, with an “in-your face” attitude still capable of shocking a 21st century audience. (Peer Gynt contains mature subject matter and language, and some of the material may not be suitable for children.)
“I selected this modern adaptation because I felt that the updating of the language and situations would make the message and story connect more to our students,” says Espeland. “The roughness of the language, modernizing Peer’s adventures by making him a human trafficker, and its references to the way we idolize TV celebrities, brings Ibsen’s message into the 21st century while still keeping the heart of the fairy tale.
“As human beings, each of us must ask ourselves who we are, what we believe, and to whom we have obligations,” Espeland adds. “This play inverts the usual paradigm of characters that look inward for answers: Peer looks outward to the entire world to serve him. His duty toward himself is to manipulate others to fulfill his needs, regardless of the suffering his manipulations impose on others.”
Dramaturg David Landskroener ’14 comments: “Audiences will be struck by this play’s denouncement of pride and self-interest. The ever-increasing modern societal message is that everything is about ’me,’ which this adaptation deconstructs in an even more timely and resonant fashion through references to reality TV.”
Peer constantly changes his persona to suit the occasion at hand: he’ll do and say anything to get what he wants. Kyle Lampar ’17, who plays the title role, describes his character as “vulgar, carefree, and unapologetic…but behind that persona of tough teenage angst, there’s a fragile individual who only wishes to fulfill his dreams.”
The design team includes Theatre Arts Professor and Scenic Designer Lanford J. Potts, Costume Designer Elaine Kauffman, Lighting Designer Katie Anderson ’15, and Sound Designer Lindsay Worthington ’17.
The show opens Thursday, May 15 at 7:30pm (which is “pay-what-you-can” night), and runs Friday and Saturday, May 16-17, at 8pm, and Sunday, May 18, at 2pm. Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for seniors, and $15 for other adults and may be purchased at the door. To make reservations, please call 269.337.7333 or visit the website for more information. Note: Thursday’s performance will be followed by the golden anniversary’s final alumni talk back, led by Kristen Chesak ’94, managing director of the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre.
K student researcher/presenters at the 2014 Experimental Biology Meeting included (l-r): Amanda Bolles, Rina Fujiwara, and Virginia Greenberger. Not pictured is Michael Korn.
Four Kalamazoo College students attended at the 2014 Experimental Biology Meeting: Amanda Bolles ’14, Chemistry; Rina Fujiwara ’15, Chemistry; Virginia Greenberger ’14, Chemistry; and Michael Korn ’14, Biology. Experimental Biology is a joint meeting of six different societies including the American Association for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) as well as societies for physiology, nutrition, pharmacology, pathology, and anatomy. The meeting provides a great opportunity for students to present their work and attend a variety of engaging scientific talks. More than 15,000 scientists attended the event in San Diego, Calif.
Bolles and Fujiwara presented their research findings during the Undergraduate Poster Competition and during the regular scientific session for ASBMB. Their research involves recent work completed in the laboratory of Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge. That work has shown that two different (but related) compounds inactivate P450 3A4, an enzyme in the liver and intestine that metabolizes (or processes) a major pharmaceutical drug. The titles of the Bolles and Fujiwara posters were, respectively, “5-Fluoro-2-[4-[(2-phenyl-1H-imidazol-5-yl)methyl]-1 piperazinyl]pyrimidine is a mechanism based inactivator of CYP3A4” and “Mechanism-based inactivation of human CYP3A4 by a piperazine-containing compound.” The ASBMB competition includes posters of some 300 students from a variety of college and universities across the country. One grand prize award was presented to a student in each of four research categories (bioenergetics/protein structure, cell biology/developmental biology, DNA/gene regulation, and immunology/microbiology/neurobiology). Bolles won the $500 grand prize in the bioenergetics/protein structure category and was recognized the next day before an audience of hundreds of scientists, educators, and students at the award lecture for outstanding contributions to education. Bolles’s presentation derived from her Senior Individualized Project (SIP), which will be published later this year along with results from co-author Fujiwara.
Greenberger conducted her SIP research in the laboratory of Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss. The abstract she presented at the meeting was titled “Bacterial Action of Novel Cationic Peptide Sequences.” As more antibiotic resistance is observed in patients, new sources of antibiotics are being investigated, including short peptide sequences. Greenberger’s work in the Truss lab was aimed at determining the antibiotic activity (and the precise mechanisms of action that yielded the activity) of two newly studied peptide sequences.
Dr. Furge also presented a poster in the ASBMB regular scientific session based on work started last year by Parker de Waal ’13. The work began as part of a course assignment in Furge’s “Advanced Biochemistry” course and grew into an elegant computational study of structural differences between select variants of the drug-metabolizing enzyme P450 2D6. de Waal used molecular dynamics methods to show how subtle differences in the enzyme structure can help explain differences in the metabolizing abilities of the enzymes. The study is being completed by Kyle Sunden ’16. While in San Diego, Furge spent an afternoon at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy at the University of California-San Diego discussing the implications and approach of the study with other scientists in this field.
Korn attended the American Physiological Society (APS) portion of the Experimental Biology meeting. He presented the results of his SIP work (conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Christopher Mendias at the University of Michigan) in the APS Student Poster Competition. Korn’s abstract received the David Bruce Outstanding Undergraduate Abstract Award. The title of his presentation was “Simvastatin reduces myosteatosis following chronic skeletal muscle injury.”
The future is promising for all four of these outstanding student researchers. In the fall, Bolles will enter the University of Michigan Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences; Greenberger will matriculate to the chemistry department at Pennsylvania State University to begin work on her Ph.D; Korn will attend the University of Michigan Medical School; and Fujiwara will complete her SIP with Furge this summer. She plans to attend graduate school after her June 2015 graduation from K.
Professors Furge and Truss are both members of the ASBMB and attend the annual meeting each year. Truss also directs a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded workshop for area high school science teachers in connection with the annual ASBMB meeting. This year’s workshop attracted more than a dozen local teachers who learned science and teaching strategies to use in their classrooms. Attendees at the workshop are also eligible for mini-grants to support further development of their teaching after the workshop. A recent article describes the impact of this workshop (which is in its fourth year).
In other meeting news, the Ruth Kirschstein Diversity in Science Award was given jointly to President Freeman Hrabowski III and Professor Michael Summers of University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Professor Summers was the SIP mentor to Erran Briggs ’14 and has worked closely with Professor Truss on the Professional Development and Minority Affairs Committees of ASBMB. Professor Summers also visited K’s campus in 2010 as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Guest Scholar Lecturer. Given the connections, and important work of Summers and Hrabowski, Professor Truss arranged for Bolles, Fujiwara, and Greenberger to interview Summers for Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership’s Praxis Center. Following the interview, Summers treated the students and Truss to lunch overlooking the San Diego Harbor marina! Notes from the interview will be posted on the Praxis website.
Travel to ASBMB for Bolles, Fujiwara, and Greenberger was supported by grants from the Provost Office, the Heyl Foundation (Greenberger), and the ACSJL. Korn’s travel to the meeting was sponsored by grant funds from his SIP advisor and the University of Michigan. Furge and Truss were supported by the Hutchcroft Endowment as well as their NIH and NSF grants, respectively. Next year’s Experimental Biology Meeting will occur in Boston, Mass.
K students (l-r) Morgan Mahdavi ’14, Chelsey Shannon ’14, Isabelle Ciaramitaro ’16, and Jordan Earnest ’14 with some of their SMART Girls.
Each Friday afternoon during the fall, winter, and spring quarters of the 2013-14 academic year, five Kalamazoo College female students have met with 16 Kalamazoo area preteen girls in a mentoring program focused on themes of identity, self-awareness, and self-worth.
Every Friday afternoon. For two hours. No exceptions.
“Consistency is most important in our mentor role,” said Jordan Applebaum Earnest ’14. “The girls know to expect us every Friday for the school year.”
The K women meet with the SMART Girls (ages 9-12) at the Boys and Girls Club to discuss themes of identity, self-awareness, and self-worth. Another team of K women also mentors a Teen SMART Girls program at the Club. Both groups of mentors meet regularly on their own to plan lessons for the girls and hold structured reflections about their own mentoring experiences.
“Over the course of the year, our lessons, activities, discussions, and writing exercises with the girls have placed a strong emphasis on healthy relationships, self-care, and emotional processing,” said Jordan. “The girls have come to recognize their own strengths and they have developed more confidence, determination, and positive energy.”
“We have, too,” said Jordan.
Jordan is a Civic Engagement Scholar through the “Mary Jane” Center and serves as director of the SMART Girls program. Hers is a funded position paid through a grant to the Center by former City of Kalamazoo Mayor Caroline Ham. The other K students are volunteers.
During the Friday May 2 downtown Kalamazoo Art Hop, K mentors and SMART Girls will host “Who We Are,” a photographic exhibit meant to demonstrate the inner strengths that each SMART Girl believes she possesses. Each SMART Girl served as art director for her own photo, choosing the props and poses that Georgina Graff ’16 captured with her camera.
“The photos represent who the SMART Girls want to grow up to be,” said Jordan. “They demonstrate qualities such as trustworthiness, intelligence, health, and creativity—all chosen by the girls themselves.”
Kalamazoo College SMART Girls mentors and mentees will host the Art Hop reception from 6-7:30 p.m. at Edison Place, 1350 Portage St., in the Washington Square/Edison neighborhood. The exhibit was curated with the help of Jessica Mancino from the Boys and Girls Club, and funded through a generous grant from Linda DeRose Primavera ’77.
Thanks to a generous gift from The Hearst Foundation, Inc., Kalamazoo College has established the William Randolph Hearst Undergraduate Research Fellowships. These competitive fellowships will provide support for summer research projects for K students majoring in the sciences or mathematics. The goal is to continue the College’s success in preparing individuals for graduate studies and careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.
Eight fellowships will be awarded each year for the next three years beginning this summer 2014. Each award will consist of a $3,000 stipend to defray travel and living expenses. Eligible disciplines include biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, and mathematics. Projects must be investigative and have the goal of generating primary research results. K first-year, sophomore, and junior students are eligible to apply.
Kalamazoo College Upjohn Professor of Life Sciences Jim Langeland ’86, Department of Biology, will serve as faculty coordinator for the program.
The Hearst Foundation and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation are national philanthropic resources for organizations working in the fields of culture, education, health, and social services. The Hearst Foundations identify and fund outstanding nonprofits to ensure that people of all backgrounds in the United States have the opportunity to build healthy, productive, and inspiring lives.
“When I see the lamppost, I will remember how Emily’s life illuminated those around her,” read Skylar Young ’15, a close friend of Emily.
