Category: Academics
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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November 4, 2010|Academics
Kathy Sexton-Radek’s first-year seminar, “Dreams and the Dreamer,” is only partly about what goes on in our minds while we sleep. It’s also about our deepest aspirations—and what we do about them when we’re awake.
Sexton-Radek is a professor of psychology and a sleep researcher. Her class offers an introduction to the science of sleep and dreams, but it gets more personal, too. She asks her students to examine their own dreams—not just the involuntary, nighttime variety, but also the kinds of hopes and plans for their own lives that we often call dreams.
“We use the word ‘dream’ freely,” Sexton-Radek says. “I want students to think about what they dream of becoming, whether it’s a med student or a musician. They should be asking themselves, ‘How can I do this thing I’m dreaming of?’”
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October 5, 2010|Academics
Megan Kirby calls herself a “literary geek,” the sort of student whose idea of a really great summer includes road trips to the Midwest’s best indie bookstores.
Kirby, a junior English major and art minor, spent part of the summer rummaging through bookshelves from the Twin Cities to Bloomington, Indiana, but she was after more than a geeky good time. Her travels were part of a research project that earned the junior an Honors Program Summer Fellowship and the $1500 award that goes with it.
Kirby was investigating the world of zines, the self-produced, underground publications that chronicle the obsessions of their copy-shop-haunting creators. By the time her summer was complete, Kirby had visited the warehouse of the world’s foremost distributor of zines, talked with artists and writers at a Minneapolis zine festival, and produced her own zine—the result, she says, “of massive caffeine intake and Sharpie fumes.”
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