Category: Academics
February 21, 2012|Academics
For most science majors, the presentation that Pat Brambert is set to deliver at the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research in Utah next month would be the highlight of a semester. For Brambert, it’s just a warm-up.
Brambert, a junior from Bloomingdale, has spent much of the last year working with Assistant Professor Stacey Raimondi on investigations into the genetic triggers that make cancer cells grow more aggressively. He was selected to present his findings at the annual NCUR meeting in late March, a showcase for the nation’s top undergraduate researchers.
But that’s just the first of two high-profile appointments Brambert has on his calendar for that week. After finishing his presentation in Utah, he will hustle back across country to offer his work at the prestigious American Association of Cancer Research conference in Chicago, a stage even more impressive than the NCUR conference.
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October 17, 2011|Academics
Gene Losey’s new chemistry lab is in an unlikely location. Every so often, especially after a heavy rain, or what Losey likes to call “a real gully-whumper,” you might find him at work in the parking lot just west of West Hall. In an unremarkable-looking white utility box there, tucked among the prairie plantings that border the student parking spaces, Losey, a professor and chair of the chemistry department, collects samples of stormwater runoff. For the last two years, he has been analyzing the water he collects there, looking for insights into the workings of the innovative stormwater-control system the College installed around West Hall before the state-of-the-art “green” residence hall opened in 2008.
“This is a natural laboratory,” Losey said one afternoon last week as he was crossing the parking lot. “It gives us a chance to collect stormwater and see what we can learn from it.”
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September 30, 2011|Academics
When Abby Heider traveled to Costa Rica for a January Term Spanish class last year, she was determined, as she put it, “to live and breathe Spanish.”
So Heider kept her journal in Spanish, wrote her shopping lists in Spanish, and chatted with her friends in Spanish. At the mountaintop language institute near the scenic Central Valley town of Santa Ana where she studied, she took classroom notes in Spanish. One day when she and her classmates took a harrowing whitewater rafting trip down the Rio Pacuare, she even found herself screaming in Spanish.
“It was total immersion in the language,” she said.
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May 11, 2011|Academics
In this 150th year since the start of the American Civil War, it is time to reconsider one of the most vexing questions to emerge from that conflict: Did Mary Todd Lincoln really need 300 pairs of gloves?
This is the sort of question that has been bothering Nicole Boylan for much of the past year. Boylan, a senior, is part of a team of student costumers who recreated 19th-century fashions for the Mill Theatre’s May production of the historical drama Abraham Lincoln. In all, the team produced 40 sets of costumes—soldier’s uniforms, ladies’ dresses, even corsets and pantaloons–aiming for historical accuracy and attention to detail. Researching their work took the costumers to archives and museums from Madison, Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. But the project began last summer with a trip to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. It was there that Boylan began to understand Mrs. Lincoln’s extraordinary fashion sense.
“She thought it was her patriotic duty to wear the very best clothes and to spend money on the very best silks,” Boylan said last week in Buik Recital Hall, where she and her fellow students were presenting their work as part of Elmhurst’s ninth annual Research and Performance Showcase. But when it came to Mrs. Lincoln’s attempts at high style, everyone was a critic. “People said her dresses made her look like a piece of furniture. They said she appeared to be wearing a flower pot on her head.”
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April 20, 2011|Academics
In a Hammerschmidt Chapel classroom last week, Katrina Sifferd was leading the seven students in her “Philosophy of Law” class through a discussion of Roper v. Simmons, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that it was unconstitutional to impose capital punishment for crimes committed while under the age of 18. Sifferd, an assistant professor of philosophy, called her students’ attention to one particular kind of evidence considered by the court: neuroscientific studies about the development of the adolescent brain that account for the juvenile tendency to act recklessly and on dangerous impulse.
“There’s science in there again, isn’t there?” Sifferd asked from the front of the room, as her students worked through the court’s ruling.
The intersection of law and neuroscience is becoming a busy place. Armed with new brain-scanning and visualization technologies that seem lifted from science fiction, scientists are peering into the working brain and unraveling our very decision-making processes. What they learn from those scans is heavy with implications for courts and for scholars like Sifferd. For better or worse, brain science promises to alter legal notions about whether defendants are culpable for the things they do and how they should be punished or treated.
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March 16, 2011|Academics
Russell Ford greeted the five students in his medical humanities senior seminar late Tuesday afternoon with a bit of fictitious good news.
“Congratulations, you’ve all just won the lottery,” he told the class. “You get one million dollars in cash. There are no strings attached, it’ s tax-free, and you have no outstanding debts. “
Ford’s students, arrayed in a semi-circle around their professor in a tiny classroom in Daniels Hall, didn’t bother celebrating. They seemed to be waiting for some inevitable bit of bad news to follow. Ford, an assistant professor of philosophy, didn’t disappoint them.
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March 10, 2011|Academics
In retrospect, it’s clear that a backyard in Chicago’s western suburbs may not have been the best place in the world to dig for dinosaur bones. Merrilee Guenther knows this now. But to be fair, she was just seven years old when she started to dig behind her family’s house in Itasca. She had just decided on a career in paleontology–the study of fossil remains from distant geological periods–and was eager to get started.
Today, Guenther is an assistant professor in Elmhurst’s biology department, and her research on the anatomy of dinosaurs takes her further afield. She’s interested in the development of hadrosaurs, sometimes called the “duck-billed dinosaurs” for their distinctively flattened snouts.
“They were the cows of the Cretaceous,” she explained last week in her office on the first floor of the Schaible Science Center, where a vintage Sinclair gas station sign, with its trademark silhouetted green dinosaur, hangs above her desk. (The Cretaceous period extended from about 135 million to 65 million years ago and marked the end of the age of reptiles and the emergence of flowering plants and modern insects.) “They were bulky herbivores and they moved in giant herds.” In some sites on the western North American plains, researchers have found what they call “death assemblages” of as many as ten thousand hadrosaurs. For paleontologists like Guenther, that means a plentiful supply of hadrosaur specimens to study. “Alberta is like hadrosaur heaven,” she said.
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February 10, 2011|Academics
One day in 2007, when Alex Grabenhofer was just a first-year student finding his way around the physics department, he was invited to a guest lecture in the Schaible Science Center. He didn’t know it at the time, but what he heard that day would end up changing the way he would spend his next four years at Elmhurst.
The lecture was by a physicist named Venkatesh Gopal, then fresh off a postdoctoral appointment at Northwestern University, and visiting Elmhurst as a candidate for a faculty post. As a kind of audition for the job, Gopal was presenting some of his latest research, which involved using physics to better understand the sensory processes of animals.
Grabenhofer, now a senior, remembers being blown away.
“I was thinking, ‘Wow, this would be a really cool topic to research.”
For the last three years, Grabehnofer has been doing just that, under Gopal’s direction. Grabenhofer works with Gopal, now an assistant professor at Elmhurst, on efforts to measure how animals process and respond to the smells around them.
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January 26, 2011|Academics
Dustan Creech, an assistant professor of art, moved his January Term metal sculpture class outside one morning last week, not because the weather was so inspiring—the plummeting wind chill made the campus feel like a meat locker—but because the class had a singular job to do.
Creech and his students had assembled a small foundry on the patio behind Old Main, where they were melting bronze down to a glowing-red 2100-degree river of metal to be poured into sculpture molds the students had prepared. The bronze pour was the climax of Creech’s course, the first of its kind at Elmhurst. Artists have been making bronze sculpture in roughly the same manner for a few thousand years, but for most of Creech’s students the chance to craft, mold and pour their own bronze sculpture was entirely novel.
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January 12, 2011|Academics
Every once in a while, one of Lance Wilcox’s students will tell him that Wilcox’s January Term class on the Civil War is the best history class he has ever had.
Wilcox is grateful for the compliment, but there is just one problem: His class is not a history class.
Wilcox, a professor of English, teaches “Literature of the Civil War,” a course that looks at the ways masters of the American literary canon like Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, as well as ordinary foot soldiers like Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee Infantry, treated the war in poems, stories and memoirs. The class is offered out of the English Department, but the students can be forgiven for their confusion. It turns out that Melville and other writers inspired by the war make pretty good history teachers, too.
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