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.

“It’s a huge deal,” Raimondi said of the cancer-research conference. “If you’re somebody in the field, you go. It’s how you become known.”

If being selected to present at two conferences in one week is a remarkable double-honor, it’s also something of a logistical challenge. One afternoon last week, Brambert stopped by Raimondi’s office to ask his professor some questions—not about their work in the lab, but about how he would manage to get back to Chicago from Utah in time for his second conference. Was Brambert anxious about the prospect?

“I think I’ve got the jitters out of the way,” he said. “Now I’m just excited to talk about what we found.”

What Brambert is finding are clues to the molecular workings of breast cancer—clues that might eventually point toward ways of shutting down the most aggressive and invasive kinds of cancer. Brambert is helping to answer one of the central questions of Raimondi’s research: What genes and proteins trigger aggressive growth in cancer cells, turning less invasive cancers into more invasive ones?

The consequences could hardly be more crucial. The five-year survival rate for patients with localized breast cancer is 98 percent, according to the National Cancer Institute. Once the cancer has metastasized, the survival rate drops to 23 percent. Finding the proteins that make cancers more invasive would be an important step in solving cancer’s deadly mysteries.

The research in Raimondi’s lab is part of an increasing number of studies that examine genetic pathways in cancer cells for information that could point toward new treatment strategies. Scientists know that aberrations in the way genes are spliced inside cancer cells affect the way DNA and RNA translate into proteins in those cells. One aberrantly spliced gene—called DNMT3B7—appears in almost every kind of cancer cell, but is not found in normal cells. Brambert has made 3B7 the focus of his work in Raimondi’s lab. He altered less aggressive cancer cells to express this protein, and found that they subsequently grew more quickly than cancer cells that had not been altered. Are genes like DNMT3B7 altering cellular signaling pathways in breast cancer—in effect, triggering tumor progression?

“I really want to answer these questions,” Brambert said. “It’s why you spend the long hours in the lab.”

Brambert came to Elmhurst intending to prepare for dentistry school. Then he took Raimondi’s cell biology class. Intrigued by the lab work, he found himself spending more and more time in the Schaible Science Center. When a spot opened up in Raimondi’s lab last year for an undergraduate researcher, she offered Brambert the opportunity. He seized it, and before long was setting his own research course.

“He comes to me with ideas that he wants to pursue,” Raimondi said. “That’s something you expect in graduate school, but you don’t often see it with undergraduates. That’s part of the maturing of a scientist.”

Now Brambert is aiming for graduate study in a research-based combined DDS/Ph.D. program, where he would like to do research into oral cancers.

“I’ve found out that I really like being in the lab,” Brambert said. “I never thought I’d have the chance to do this kind of research. But I’d tell anyone who was coming to Elmhurst to take advantage of the opportunity to do research. There are people

Barron is a Catholic priest of the Chicago archdiocese, and he preaches from an extraordinary pulpit. His podcasts, tweets, online videos and 10-part television series Catholicism, which ran on many PBS affiliates last year, are part of his mission “to reach out to the culture” to communicate his faith’s message. Barron has been called a successor to the pioneering mid-20th century Catholic televangelist Bishop Fulton Sheen. But in this edition of the Quick Studies podcast series, Barron acknowledges that he is working in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Romano and Carrillo are members of Elmhurst’s mock trial team, and Chuggy’s is the fictitious nightspot at the heart of the criminal case they and hundreds of other collegiate teams are trying this year. In mock trial competitions, students and their teams earn points for convincingly simulating the roles of attorneys or witnesses in an ersatz courtroom trial. So in this early-morning practice session, Romano was playing a prosecuting attorney; Carrillo, a defendant charged with murder after the death of a passenger in the car he crashed following a long night of drinking at Chuggy’s. Romano’s mission was to punch holes in his account of the night.

“Did you turn on your radar detector even before you started your car for your drive home that night?” Romano’s prosecutor character asked at one point. And when Carrillo, seated in front of her, hesitated, she asked again: “Did you know you were going to drive recklessly that night?”

Romano, Carrillo and the other members of the mock-trial team have been grilling each other like this since August. That’s when they began preparing to try this year’s case, the details of which are laid out in a 300-page black binder supplied by the American Mock Trial Association. Every mock trial team in the nation gets the same black binder, and mastering the evidence and the statements between its covers is one of the basic tasks for competitors. But that’s the easy part. The real challenge has less to do with knowing your facts than with convincing everyone else in a courtroom that you know your facts.

In the team’s most recent competition, at the National Invitational Tournament at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, Romano, a junior communications major, earned Top Witness honors, for her portrayal of the defendant. But in this morning’s practice, Romano was working to master the prosecutor’s role. Carrillo was proving an elusive witness.

When Carrillo, in the role of the defendant, skirted a question about how much he’d had to drink at Chuggy’s, Romano failed to follow-up forcefully. The team’s head coach, Alicia Hawley, an attorney at the Chicago law firm McDermott, Will and Emery and an adjunct professor in the political science department, interrupted.

“He never answered your question,” she reminded Romano. “Ask it again, and say it like you mean it. Use your lawyer voice.”

What Hawley calls a lawyer voice is one of the essential tools of the mock trial competitor. If each competition is a performance, the performances rarely go precisely as planned. Students must be nimble thinkers and persuasive talkers. Communicating with confidence and authority—communicating with one’s lawyer voice–usually wins tournaments.

“You have to think critically and you have to communicate under pressure,” Hawley said. “Those are skills that will help you in any profession.”

Mock trial teams like Elmhurst’s are forming in more and more colleges and high schools. Hawley said that the number of teams recognized by the American Mock Trial Association has doubled in recent years.

Elmhurst’s team formed as a club several years ago. Now mock trial is also a credit-bearing course at the College, taught by Mary Walsh, an assistant professor in the political science department. With its long season of road trips to invitational tournaments and regional competitions, mock trial is something like a hybrid of the academic and the athletic, the cerebral and the competitive.

“As an intellectual activity, it’s the closest thing to a team sport that you will find,” said Edward Momkus, a partner at the law firm Momkus McCluskey, a trustee of the College, and one of the team’s coaches. “There are individual awards, but it’s really about everyone working together.”

The team’s next big test: The Joliet Regional Tournament, at the Will County Courthouse on February 18 and 19, with the right to continue to national competition on the line.

Some of the members of Elmhurst’s team are aiming for careers in law. Others are attracted to mock trial by its emphasis on performance and public speaking. All agree that, as a competitive pursuit, it doesn’t get the respect or recognition it deserves. They have become accustomed to explaining to friends and classmates just what mock trial is and why they would want to participate.

So before submitting to another cross-examination, Carrillo, a junior political science major, tried to explain—one more time—some of the appeal of mock trial.

“It’s the most beneficial thing I’ve ever done,” Carrillo said. “We’re learning to think fast under pressure and be confident. It’s literally making us smarter.”

“Or at least it’s making us sound smarter.”

No further questions.

Matheney is the College’s chaplain, a job that ordinarily requires him to work from the front of the room. But this afternoon, he was rehearsing readers for the College’s annual Festival of Lessons and Carols. One by one, Elmhurst students and staff were taking turns stepping up to the chapel’s lectern, now flanked for the season by ribboned Christmas trees, to read through the Bible texts they had been assigned for the holiday service. After each reading, Matheney’s voice echoed from the rear of the church: “Thanks be to God!” Then he offered the same advice again and again: “Slow down!”

December on a college campus is not a propitious time for slowing down. Final exams loom. Long-procrastinated papers come due. Malls beckon. Stress levels soar.

The Festival of Lessons and Carols offers a counterpoint to the frenzy of the season. It is one night of candlelight and calm, music and ancient words. And for it to be done properly, Matheney says, there must be a certain cadence. A stateliness.

“Anticipation is what this season is all about,” he said. “We have to wait to get to the presence of the holy.”

Elmhurst’s celebration is based on the annual Christmas Eve service presented by King’s College at Cambridge University since 1918. It tells the Christmas story in readings from the Old Testament and New, advancing from prophecy to fulfillment. The tradition of Christmas services with sacred music and Scripture readings at Elmhurst dates back at least to 1933, when the College began offering what was then called a Candlelight Carol Service. By 1961, when it was first billed as a Festival of Lessons and Carols, most of the service’s now-familiar elements were in place: the darkened chapel, the procession of candle-bearing choristers, young voices singing timeless hymns.

Matheney has seen the tradition grow. When he came to Elmhurst 15 years ago, the service drew a few hundred congregants each year. Now it attracts so many worshipers that the College offers two annual services in the 1000-seat chapel.

Matheney sticks close to the service’s high-church roots. “The joke is that I’ll be bringing in incense next, “ he says. “But nobody else around here does it quite like we do. There’s a certain majesty and grandeur.”

Grand tradition may be part of its appeal, but that doesn’t mean the service has been allowed to grow creaky with age. One of the highlights of this year’s celebration was the Elmhurst debut of an African “Noel,” sung in the Kituba dialect, that featured the more than 100 members of the College’s choirs, directed by Susan Moninger and Donna Peterson Tallman, clapping and stomping in time.

“I think that one’s a keeper,” Matheney said.

As the chapel filled for the first service, Matheney was out among the congregation, now in his clerical robes. Candles lined the center aisle. Some of the people he greeted in the pews had been returning for years, drawn by the chance to sing together again in the chapel’s mild light. Old friends traded hugs. There were students there, too, first-timers, taking a break from the end-of-semester rush to be a part of the tradition. At this time of year the academic calendar converges with the liturgical one. So that even as students are getting ready for their exams, churches are getting ready for the coming of the Savior. Semester’s end coincides with the beginning of Advent. And for decades now, the Lessons and Carols service at Elmhurst has marked both.

“This is a time to pause,” Matheney told the congregation in his opening prayer.

Everything was ready. There was a moment of stillness. Then, as they have for so many years, the people started singing.

Merklein already was a high-scoring hoops standout at Plainfield Central High School when, late in her sophomore year, she landed awkwardly after leaping for a rebound and badly injured her knee. Doctors would later tell her that she had torn both her anterior cruciate ligament and her medial collateral ligament. But the pop she heard when she injured the knee had already told her all she need to know.

“I knew I was done,” she remembered recently. “It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.”

Now, nearly six years later, Merklein is a senior pre-med major at Elmhurst leading the Bluejays women’s basketball team to one of its best starts ever. The Bluejays top scorer and rebounder, Merklein scored her 1000th career point last week in the team’s fifth win, a 64-58 road victory at Webster University. Two dates loom large in her plans for 2012: Merklein hopes to lead the Bluejays in NCAA tournament play in March; and in June, she intends to take to take her medical-school admission tests.

The pain she felt in the aftermath of her knee injury helps explain her determination to succeed at both challenges.

Merklein remembers crying in her doctor’s office not long after hurting her knee. It was becoming clear to her that recovering from her knee injury would require months of painful rehabilitation. And even then she would likely miss out on her junior year of basketball—prime time for athletes hoping to win the attention of college recruiters. At the time, all Merklein wanted to know how was quickly she could get back to game action. But the surgeon who repaired her knee, Dr. Gordon Nuber, warned her that there would be no short cuts.

“He was strict with me,” Merklein said. “He told me, ‘I’m not going to let you come back early.’”

As it turned out, rehabilitating the knee took seven months, though it would be more than a year before Merklein felt like her old athletic self. There were countless exercises to be repeated. Slowly, Merklein began to regain her range of motion. Even something as simple as running had to be relearned, the rhythm of it mastered again, so that one leg did not lag behind the other.

“It was one of the hardest things I’ve done,” Merklein said of the rehab. But she became such a fixture in the workout room that her physical therapist often had to kick her out so she could get the rest she needed. “I wanted to play basketball again.”

When she finally returned to her high school team late in her junior year, she knew the rehab had been a success. She scored 12 points in her first game back. And the experience left her with a new professional goal: she wanted to be a doctor. She had noticed the way Nuber not only had repaired her physically, but had worked with her as an individual. When necessary, he had pushed her to work harder. Other times, he had cautioned her against trying to do too much too quickly.

“I thought about how my doctor helped me get back to playing basketball, how he pushed me to get better. I’d love to do that for someone else,” said Merklein, who is considering a career in sports medicine, among other specialties. “Having been through the surgery and the rehab may make me a better doctor someday.”

In its own way, preparing for medical school has proven every bit as challenging as her knee rehab. Merklein has had to learn to manage basketball workouts, internships arranged through the college’s Patterson Center for the Health Professions, and her studies. It has required the kind of effort she displayed during her rehab.

“Meghan’s always in the library, putting in her hours. She closes the place lots of nights,” said Tethnie Carrillo, Elmhurst’s women’s basketball coach. Carrillo, who has made it a goal for the Bluejays to have one of the best team grade point averages in the country, said Merklein’s determination sets an example for her younger teammates. “Her teammates see how hard she works.”

It’s no surprise that, having worked so diligently to get back to basketball, Merklein would like to extend her final season at Elmhurst for as long as possible. Last year’s team missed postseason tournament play in part because of too many early-season losses. This year’s team is off to a 5-1 start.

“We want to win a league championship and get into the NCAA tournament,” Merklein said.

As always, there is more work to be done.

Last month, the magazine won an Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker award, sometimes called the Pulitzer Prize of student media. Winning recognition on campus, though, has proven more difficult.

“I’ll tell people that I work on MiddleWestern Voice and they’ll say, ‘MiddleWestern Voice? I didn’t know you were in the choir,’” Creative director Annie Balavitch, a senior graphic design student from Muskegon, Michigan, said in the MWV offices in the basement of the Frick Center last week. “They don’t know we exist.”

Balavitch and the rest of the magazine’s staff are determined to change that. They’re hoping that the Pacemaker—MWV was one of just four publications of its kind in the nation to win one—will help raise the magazine’s campus profile. At last week’s staff meeting, one of the topics of discussion was a new batch of promotional posters and giveaway postcards that proudly tout MWV as an award-winner. It’s part of a campaign to encourage more Elmhurst students to submit work—fiction, poems, visual art, original music–to the annually published magazine.

“We want people to understand that it’s a big deal to have their work in the magazine,” Balavitch said, “The more work we have to choose from, the better the magazine will be.”

Not that it’s necessarily easy to win over an on-campus audience. In recent years, the magazine has tried everything from poetry slams to ugly-sweater parties to build name recognition on campus. (MiddleWestern Voice takes its name from Ursula Niebuhr’s assessment of her husband, the eminent theologian and 1910 Elmhurst graduate, Reinhold Niebuhr.) Balavitch remembers seeing an issue of MiddleWestern Voice for the first time as a freshman and being mostly unmoved. The following year, though, Assistant Professor of Art Geoff Sciacca urged Balavitch to join the magazine’s staff. MWV was just beginning to transform itself into a more ambitious, full-color magazine with layouts that displayed the graphic-design influence of highly regarded consumer publications like Wired and Nylon. Balavitch was hooked. She made up her mind that she wanted to help shape the magazine’s evolving visual style.

Last year’s prize-winning issue included short fiction by Megan Kirby about a young man’s self-destructive return to “the stained sidewalks…the pervasive smells of exhaust” of his depressed hometown; a portfolio of work produced for the Elmhurst campus by Professor John Pitman Weber’s mosaics class; and a playful cover illustration by Katy McEvoy inspired by the psychedelic lyrics of Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door.” (You can check out the entire issue here.)

“The magazine is getting more and more interesting and aesthetic,” Balavitch said.

She’s not the only one to notice. Pacemaker judges praised the award-winners for their “variety of topics and ideas presented” and for “layouts that dazzled.” MWV may even be winning attention, at last, on campus. Balavitch said more students are showing up at the magazine’s staff meetings to get involved. She hopes the endorsement of the Pacemaker award judges gives a welcome boost to the magazine’s profile.

“We’ve always been a little under-recognized here,” Balavitch said. “Maybe this award will help us do something about that.”

But O’Malley and company won’t be playing games. They’ll be creating them.

O’Malley, a sophomore computer science major and the founder of Elmhurst’s new Computer Game Developers Club, is getting ready for Global Game Jam 2012, a kind of international marathon of extreme technophile artistry. He has registered Elmhurst as one of hundreds of sites around the world where designers, visual artists, musicians and code-crunchers team up for a weekend of building games from scratch, all based on a secret theme revealed only at the start of the festivities. At the last Global Game Jam, in January 2011, some 6500 participants gathered in 44 countries to produce more than 1500 original games. The theme: extinction.

“There’s a real buzz about it on campus,” O’Malley said one afternoon in a lounge in Daniels Hall, just down a corridor from the computer lab where his club meets every week. The challenge, he figured, will be not just recruiting participants, but organizing them.

“We’ll be working in teams and in shifts, though some people will have to be there continually. That would probably be me,” he said, sounding not a little excited at the prospect.

This is the sort of challenge O’Malley had in mind when he launched the Game Developers Club earlier this year. When he arrived on campus as a first-year student, he was happy to discover Gamers Elite of Elmhurst College, or GEEC. (Yes, O’Malley said unabashedly, that’s pronounced “geek.”) He joined GEEC, but couldn’t help feeling that something was still missing.

“They just play video games,” O’Malley explained. “But I was thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to create your own games?’”

That’s where the new Game Developers Club comes in. The group meets on Thursday nights in Daniels Hall, and its goal is to produce a new, original Xbox 360 game by the end of the academic year. O’Malley plans to offer the club’s creation on Live Arcade, a service that lets independent game developers share their latest work.

“When I’m playing a game I really like, I’m always thinking ‘How did they create that?’ and “Could I do something like that?’” O’Malley said.

To help him answer those questions, he has been busy recruiting creative talent. His club has its share of computer-science students, yes, but also art majors, musicians, and creative writers. O’Malley said he was in the process of recruiting a history major to help him research possible scenarios for historical games.

“I want to get everyone involved, make it a total campus effort,” O’Malley said.

The idea is to simulate a professional setting, so O’Malley asks the club’s members to form teams, develop projects and set deadlines. At the club’s weekly meetings, he offers tutorials in Microsoft’s XNA game-development system. “Anyone can do it,” he said.

Launching the Game Developers Club and preparing for Global Game Jam (January 27-29), have taken so much of O’Malley’s time that he has had to cut back on his own gaming. Not that he seems to mind all that much. “This is my gaming time now,” he said.

O’Malley already has absorbed one essential lesson of the creative professional. He declined to offer too many details about the club’s plans for its new Xbox game.

“That’s what I love about this field,” he said a little slyly. “The possibilities are just endless.”

Vertigan learned earlier in October that she would be honored by the Human Rights Campaign of Chicago as its college student of the year at the group’s annual black-tie awards dinner at Chicago’s Fairmount Hotel on November 12. That was the good news. Vertigan seemed slightly less excited about the responsibility that went with the award: speaking for three minutes or so in front of about 1000 well-dressed people at the dinner. She’d been mulling over the speech ever since.

“That’s today’s project, to write the speech,” Vertigan said. “I don’t know if I should do the Academy Award thing and list everyone who’s ever helped me, or just say how grateful I am.”

Vertigan is being honored as a role model for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. She is a member of the College’s LGBT organization EQuAl (Elmhurst Queers and Allies), and has helped develop its annual Big Gay Gathering, a campus event for high school students that showcases the College as an inclusive environment. The next Big Gay Gathering will be December 9.

If she is a little daunted by her upcoming turn as a public speaker, Vertigan has already proven herself an accomplished communicator. When Elmhurst made national headlines this fall as the first college to include on its admission application an optional question for prospective students about sexual orientation, she became a go-to source for reporters looking for student reaction.

Vertigan was quoted in Chicago Tribune and Associated Press stories that ran in publications from coast to coast. She told the AP that the College’s application question was an important one “if for the sole reason that Elmhurst is letting people know that diversity is more than just what color your skin is or what language you speak.”

In the same AP story, Elmhurst’s dean of admission, Gary Rold, explained that the College added the question to encourage diversity on campus and to connect students with resources to help them make the transition to college. That made sense to Vertigan. “It’s easy to feel isolated and alone,” she said. But as she looked back at the episode, she also seemed a little surprised the application question had made news at all.

“I really didn’t know other colleges weren’t doing the same thing on their applications,” she said. “But when I found out we were the first, it made me so proud to be an Elmhurst student. It shows that the College knows the right thing to do.”

Vertigan knows well what a difference acceptance can make. She said she has found it at Elmhurst and at her church, First United of Oak Park, where her pastor advocates for full equality for lesbians and gays. And she describes herself as “super-lucky” to have received it from parents. She recalled nervously coming out to her mother two years ago over dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Her mother’s response, she said, was to casually ask her to pass the soy sauce.

But Vertigan also said she knows plenty of students who have had more difficult encounters with family.

“I know people who have parents praying for them to get better,” she said. “It breaks my heart when people use the same Scripture to condemn my friends that I use to find comfort.”

Vertigan, a double-major in Spanish and religion and service, said she is considering attending seminary after she graduates in the spring.

But first, there’s the matter of the speech she has to make at the Human Rights Campaign of Chicago’s awards dinner. How appropriate is it that we’re calling it an acceptance speech?

“I just want to live my life as authentically as I can,” she said. “The College lives up to those values really well. It sets a great example for students. I could talk all day about it.”
*****

Also: check out the College’s new Out at Elmhurst web page, featuring the voices of LGBT students and allies.