S-STEM students present at science symposium
Six students took advantage of the opportunity to share research findings and sharpen their presentation skills at a science symposium held at Harvard Medical School. The undergraduates, who are in Colgate’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Program (S-STEM), mingled with peers from other universities, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and others at the New England Science Symposium held Feb. 28.
    “It was a great experience to discuss my work in this kind of setting,” said Walfrey Lim ’11. “It allowed me to interact and learn about other people’s research projects and immerse myself in different areas of biology.”
    Lim and Yvett Sosa ’12 presented a poster about their research, which they had conducted with Editza Velazquez ’11, of how three different species of bacillus create spores.
    Sosa said she got a lot of satisfaction from discussing her work and having it reviewed in such a formal setting. “I had a chance to sharpen the skills I need in presenting, and it was a good chance to network with a wide range of people,” she said.
    Also attending the symposium were Marvee Espiritu ’12, Julio Chanelo ’12, Vickie Cadestin ’12, and Lucy Velasquez ’11. Velasquez found it a bit nerve-wracking at first to be among the 150 or so presenters, but it took just a couple of conversations to make her comfortable. She presented a poster about her research into how single-nucleotide polymorphisms might affect the size of different breeds of dogs. She worked on the project this past summer with Luis Mejia ’11 in the lab of biology professor Barbara Hoopes.
    All the students had taken advantage of Colgate’s summer research program and had presented their findings to fellow students and to professors. They are among the dozen students in the S-STEM program, which is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
    The program supports selected students with an interest in health-science fields who are from under-represented communities or from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Administered by the Center for Learning, Teaching, and Research and the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the program provides the students with educational and financial support through their sophomore, junior, and senior years.
    Germaine Gogel, associate professor of chemistry and director of  S-STEM, and Katherine Hoffmann, a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry, went with the students to the symposium.
    “It was a fantastic experience for all of us,” said Gogel. “I think it reinforces in our students the belief that they can do this — they can get a degree in the sciences and pursue a career in the field.”

Students create symbols of peace
More than 50 students took part in an effort to fold paper into 1,000 origami cranes to send to Nagasaki, Japan, one of two Japanese cities hit with an atomic bomb during World War II.

   

   “A thousand cranes is symbolic of a community’s hope and dedication to peace in this world,” said Alex Sklyar ’10, co-founder of Colgate Global Citizens for Peace (CGC). During his visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki while studying abroad in Japan, Sklyar was moved by the strength of the residents’ hope for peace, which inspired him to bring a bit of that hope to campus.
    Working with Shauna Dunton ’10 and Carolina van der Mensbrugghe ’10, Sklyar founded CGC this semester. Its mission is to raise awareness about important issues in international peace activism on campus and to provide students with a path to pursue that interest.
    “We hope to change the focus of the club every semester to a different area of peace activism,” said Sklyar. “This semester, we’re focusing on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.”
    Along with making cranes, students learned about nuclear weaponry from posters and information sheets. There also was a petition-signing event to support President Barack Obama in talking more openly about nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament at the treaty revision session this May at the United Nations. The Japan Club made sushi for the event.
    “We hope that the people who come here feel like they are contributing to the international peace activism movement in a way. Also, by exposing them to Japanese food, culture, and tradition, [it instills] a sense of global community,” said Sklyar.
    Bryan Rasbury ’12 commended CGC’s efforts to raise awareness of this important issue. “A lot of times people just turn a blind eye to certain things, and once things are in the past, people just forget about them. So it’s great to make people remember and to show them that this happened, and we should be aware of it,” he said.
    Along with sending 1,000 cranes to Nagasaki this summer, CGC hopes to connect with a sister group in Japan to work together toward peace activism at their respective schools. They are planning upcoming lectures with an atom-bomb survivor and with someone who has lived with an atom-bomb survivor.
— Lea Furutani ’10

Professor performs key role in digital theater archive
For the past seven years, English professor Susan Cerasano has been working on a project that aims to create the world’s most important digital archive on early modern English theater. The first stage of this major scholarly endeavor is now available.
    Cerasano is a member of the advisory board for the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitization Project, which is led by a team of experts from King’s College London, The Museum of London, UCLA, and the University of Reading.
    The experts have been working to make available the largest collection of manuscript material on professional theater and dramatic performance in the age of Shakespeare and many other leading playwrights online. These include the only surviving records of theater box office receipts for any play by Shakespeare, the 1600 contract to build the Fortune Theatre in London, and notes of payments to playwrights including Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton.
    The original collection, housed at the Dulwich College Archive in London, holds thousands of pages of manuscripts relating to its founder, the celebrated actor and entrepreneur Edward Alleyn (1566–1626), and of his father-in-law Philip Henslowe (d. 1616), the most successful theater impresario of the age.
    Cerasano, chief academic consultant for the project, wrote biographies of Alleyn and Henslowe as well as three foundational essays for the website. She also helped plan and choose materials for the database.
    “This project is an excellent example of how today’s technology can relate to historic documents,” she said. “It will not only make further study much more widely accessible, but also is critically important for conservation purposes.”
    Cerasano has worked with the Dulwich College Archive for more than 20 years, and has written numerous essays on Henslowe and Alleyn. She authored biographies of both men for the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, one of the definitive historical sources in the United Kingdom, and is currently editing the diary of Alleyn for Oxford University Press.

Students, elders build digital stories and relationships
What do a 20-something Colgate student and a 70-something area resident have in common? More than you might think, it turns out.
    Twelve seniors taking a class called Sociology of Age, Aging, and the Lifecourse were paired with an elder and tasked with creating a digital story about that person. The students in sociology professor Meika Loe’s course, though, learned as much about themselves as they learned about their partners, discovering what “it” is that can define a person’s life and give it real meaning. Timely lessons, Loe pointed out, for students considering post-Colgate options and the need to navigate friendships, family, material life and possessions, and a sense of home in a new way.


Mary Deland of Hamilton points out some photographs to Jane Eilbacher ’10. The pair worked on a digital story about Deland’s life for the class Sociology of Age, Aging, and the Lifecourse. (Photo by Andrew Daddio)

    The lab component of the course culminated in the digital stories — three-minute videos that were screened in Golden Auditorium. While there was no red carpet, it was like a movie premiere at the auditorium for the students and elders who greeted each other as old friends and shared animated conversations with classmates, family members, and friends.
    Joanna Sherman ’10 chatted with her elder partner, Joanne Geyer. The two hadn’t known each other before the project, despite living only a few houses away from each other in the village. They met about five times at the Barge coffee shop and spent hours talking. They soon discovered that they were both only children, and that they shared interests in international relations and the columns and books of Nicholas Kristof.
    “It was just such a pleasant surprise how much the two of us had in common,” said Sherman, a political science major. “I feel like I have made a new friend in the Hamilton community.”
    Carol Bergen of Hamilton met with Laura McDonald ’10 several times to share her story, which focused on her passion for the Spanish language and Hispanic studies.
    “We laughed together, and we cried together,” said Bergen. “It was emotional for me to go back in time like that.”    
    The collaborative nature of the project was compelling for everyone involved, said Loe. “It was interesting to see how the life story moved from memories to being a student-elder co-production, and how both elders and students walked away with new perspectives.”
    Jane Eilbacher ’10 worked with Mary Deland, who discussed the importance of family and about serving as postmaster in nearby West Eaton. Deland couldn’t attend the campus screening, so Eilbacher went to her Madison Lane apartment to show the video.
    “I didn’t know ahead of time, but Mary’s family came to see it, and we had the chance to watch the digital story together,” said Eilbacher. “After hearing so much about the people in her life, it was wonderful to talk with them and see the great rapport Mary has with her daughter and grandsons.”
    The videos don’t represent an elder’s whole life — they can’t in three minutes — but they might provide an understanding of that life.
    “It was eye-opening for me,” said Kate Gundersen ’10, who spoke after her partner Arthur Rashap ’58 taped the script for their video in the audio studio of Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology.
    “It was great to put what we were learning in class into such real terms,” she said. “And it was a highlight of my week to meet with Arthur. He had so many experiences to share.”

Picker Institute funds new collaborative research projects
Colgate faculty members will collaborate with professors from around the world and the nation on research projects funded by the university’s Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute.
    According to the director, biology professor Damhnait McHugh, the institute supports research by faculty members who combine their expertise from different areas of study “to address otherwise intractable scientific questions,” she said.
    The grants were awarded to: Krista Ingram, assistant biology professor; and James Watkins, a plant ecophysiologist, and Nancy Pruitt, a comparative cellular physiologist.
    Ingram will work with Guy Bloch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Rudolf Meier, National University of Singapore, to examine how ant workers in a nest organize all of their necessary behaviors or tasks when no single ant is in control. It turns out that ants rely on the same mechanism that humans use to organize their daily activities: an internal molecular rhythm generator called the circadian clock.
    The scientists will investigate the genetic structure of the ant circadian clock, explore how genes that regulate circadian rhythms are associated with specific tasks, and reconstruct the patterns of change in rhythm regulation throughout ant evolution. The team hopes to improve the understanding of the role of molecular clocks in the synchronization of animal behavior with external environments.
    Watkins and Pruitt are teaming up with Melvin Oliver, a molecular biologist at the University of Missouri, to examine how plants respond to desiccation. Environmental changes in the coming decades will expose plants to extreme stress and will likely alter natural species’ distributions, upset ecosystem processes, and threaten the world’s food supply.
    The scientists will focus on an ancient group of plants — ferns — that respond differently to desiccation at various stages of their life cycles. In addition to lab work at Colgate and the University of Missouri, the project will take the researchers and Colgate students to Costa Rica for fieldwork. It will be one of the first studies to integrate ecological, physiological, and molecular approaches in seeking to understand the mechanisms by which plants have evolved to survive on dry land and how they are likely to behave under predicted global change scenarios.

Harlem trip offers cultural awakening
During his first two years at Colgate, Naledi Semela ’10 lived in the Harlem Renaissance Center (HRC). Yet, he didn’t fully connect the residence’s theme to its history and culture — until he took the recent Harlem Renaissance Tour.
    “There were portraits and artworks on the walls,” said Semela, an art and art history major, “but they felt like relics, or like they were there for aesthetic reasons. Visiting the landmarks and hearing about the people helped us fill in the gaps.”


(Photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio)

    On the 21-hour whirlwind tour, Semela and 50 other students and administrators visited sites significant to the Harlem Renaissance period, including the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was founded in opposition to racially segregated seating in houses of worship; the home of Madame C.J. Walker, the nation’s first African American woman millionaire and entrepreneur; and the Apollo Theater, where nearly every American jazz great debuted. Afterward, some two dozen members of Colgate’s Alumni of Color organization joined the group for a traditional soul food dinner.
    Before the trip, students attended a day of Harlem Renaissance lectures. Keenan Grenell, Colgate’s vice president and dean of diversity, explored the prosperous tradition of entrepreneurship in Harlem; English professor Michael Coyle looked at the powerful poetry of the period; and Mel Watkins ’62, NEH Professor in the humanities and author, discussed the rise of assertive satire and literary humor.
    “The workshop topics helped us build connections to the significant sites and people of Harlem,” said Shevorne Martin ’08, ALANA outreach/ programming coordinator, who led the trip. “We learned not only the significance of the Harlem Renaissance period, but also its importance to Colgate — especially in terms of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. ’30, one of our most well-known graduates.”
    Fast-forward to today: the presence on the trip of Yasmin Mannan ’12 made the Colgate–Harlem connection even more real. Her father, Mujib Mannan, is a musician and director of the Harlem Jazz Festival, and he, too, was mentioned several times during the tour.



Syllabus
HIST 313: Upstate History (new)
MW 2:45–4:00, Alumni Hall 108
Faye Dudden, Professor of History

Course description: Upstate New York has a rich history. In the late 1700s, it was a borderland between Europeans and Native Americans. Pre–Civil War, it was a hotbed of radical social movements, an economic powerhouse fed by canals and railroads, and a haven for all sorts of “isms,” from millenarianism to utopian communism. Later, it became home to industries and immigrants. Recently, upstate has exemplified the declining fortunes of the “rustbelt.” This course explores upstate issues of national significance, as well as phenomena unique to the area.

On the reading list: Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850; Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862; Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race; Ginsberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York

Key assignments/activities: Long paper on a site study; field trips including to the home of the utopian Oneida Community (1848–1880)

The professor says: I’ve been thinking about developing this course for years; any historian who specializes in 19th-century social history knows the importance of the “Burned-Over District” here in upstate. An example of the students’ site studies is one focusing on the 1821 exhumation of the body of Major Andre, the British spy who was executed for his role in the Benedict Arnold treason plot; he was originally buried in Rockland County. So far, the class is most enthused about Alan Taylor’s book William Cooper’s Town; we brought in a speaker from the New York State Historical Association, and the students suggested we invite Taylor himself.

Live and learn



Lindsey Jacobson ’10 reports: During winter break, 12 other students and I rekindled ties made by alumni more than 100 years ago, in an extended study trip to India.

We were all students in Religion 326A: Far From Thy Valley, a course dedicated to studying Colgate Baptist missionaries and their contributions to communities in northeast India. The course, taught by Asian studies, philosophy, and religion professor John Ross Carter, focused on the alumni as individuals and examined the dedication they needed to face missionary life. Each student then chose a missionary (a Colgate alumnus or spouse) to write a paper on.

Visiting the Council of Baptist Churches in North East India, Eastern Theological College, and Harding Theological College, we presented our papers to descendents of the people who were converted to Christianity by Colgate alumni, including Miles Bronson 1836, Cyrus Barker 1838, Ira Stoddard 1845, William Ward 1848, M.C. Mason 1872, Elnathan G. Phillips 1872, P.H. Moore 1876, and Frederick W. Harding 1904.

It was exciting to see the real-world connection to our classwork. The students and faculty we met in India were also inspired to learn more about the Colgate men and women who had such an impact on their lives. They expressed how grateful they were to the missionaries, and by extension, treated us with much kindness everywhere we went. We were considered honored guests, and they incorporated us into their “college families” through cultural presentations and sports.

It was an honor to represent Colgate and to be associated with the fine men and women who risked their lives for a calling.

See a slideshow of photos from the trip at www.colgate.edu/photos

Good to know: research projects yield tips and advice
The research findings of students who took last fall’s Geographic Information Systems course, taught by professors Adam Burnett and Pete Scull, could be useful to a variety of people, from government officials to vacation planners. In a project aimed at demonstrating their ability to use GIS to collect data, formulate an appropriate analysis, and cogently present their results, the students were given carte blanche to come up with their own topics, said Burnett. Some added a GIS dimension to research for another class; others explored aspects of a personal interest. Whether serious or more lighthearted, Burnett said, all of the projects had good GIS science going on behind them. Here is a sampling:

America’s Next MLB Team If expansion is planned, Albuquerque, N.M., should be the next city to have a Major League Baseball team. Sara Aschheim ’11 studied factors for success, which include a city far from another with an existing team, with the financial wherewithal to support a team, and a significant Latino population, reflecting the growing interest in baseball among that group.

Accessing Food Lack of access to quality food outlets correlates directly with areas of higher poverty in Madison County, N.Y., where 11 percent of residents live in poverty. Jen Rusciano ’10 found that the areas with 12 to 15 percent of residents living below the poverty line had 11 low-quality and six high-quality food outlets, while areas with only 2.6 to 7 percent of residents below the poverty line had seven high-quality and only two low-quality stores. Many areas, particularly impoverished ones, are not served by any, she found. Food for thought for county officials and developers.



Rise in Lyme Disease Get out the bug spray and pull up your socks. The incidence of Lyme disease — carried by deer ticks — in New York has risen sharply (1,000 more cases in 2008 than in 2007). Cat Weiss ’10 attributes that rise to the increased contact between deer and humans due to increasing proximity. She found that perimeters of residential land that borders deer habitat, as well as land with nearby water sources that borders deer habitat, rose significantly between 1992 and 2001.

Which Route to Choose? If you plan to bike across America, Meg Hanley ’11 recommends you take the Trans-America Bicycle Trail from Astoria, Ore., to Yorktown, Va. Of the three major cross-country routes, it is the longest, and has the largest percentages of the route within parks. And while it covers more ground with steep slopes than the Southern Tier route, the mid-latitude TransAmerica trail presents bikers with a more temperate climate than either the Southern or Northern Tier routes.