Taking quantum mechanics beyond theory
While physicists consider the century-old theory of quantum mechanics to be the most successful physical theory ever invented, they have spent several decades figuring out the best way to teach it. Professor Enrique “Kiko” Galvez is at the forefront of that effort.
    Starting in 1999 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Charles Holbrow, now an emeritus professor, and Galvez embarked on a project that at the time seemed far-fetched and bold. Taking advantage of stunning research discoveries of only a decade earlier, they created a series of physics experiments that could illustrate the most puzzling abstractions of quantum mechanics in the laboratory for undergraduates to see.


Professor Kiko Galvez’s photon quantum mechanics lab is transforming physics education. Here, Galvez (left) shows David Craig (middle) of Le Moyne College and Walter Smith of Haverford College a demonstration. (Photo by Andrew Daddio)

    “By 2005, we had not only satisfied our wildest expectations, but we also started disseminating and designing prototypes that others could adopt,” Galvez said.
    For the lay person, Galvez explained it this way: “The predictions of quantum mechanics rely on philosophically troubling precepts, such as ‘superposition,’ where, taken to an extreme case, objects can be traveling through two separate openings at the same time.
    “Another example,” he explained, “is ‘realism,’ where the physical reality of an object can be undefined, meaning that an object can be two distinct things at once. And then there’s ‘nonlocality,’ where two objects can be so intrinsically linked, or ‘entangled,’ that doing something to one affects the other instantly, regardless of where it is.’”
    Previously, these predictions, and others, were considered impractical for classroom instruction in physics.
    “Quantum mechanics everywhere was taught in a mechanistic sense,” he said. “That is, using the mathemat-ics and predictive power of the theory, but ignoring its philosophical consequences.” So, in order to get students excited about experimentation, Galvez created a way to show that these fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics are true.
    “We see them in action right before our eyes — although not literally, as the light is too weak for our eyes to see them. But at least they are within an arm’s length! We use light, which in the quantum world is made of photons. So we call them ‘photon quantum mechanics laboratories.’”
    Galvez has given talks at national and international conferences about the experiments, which led to the hosting of annual workshops at Colgate, where professors from some of the nation’s leading research universities learn how to replicate the experiments in their own labs. The most recent workshop, in August, welcomed professors from Haverford, the University of San Diego, and elsewhere. It was sponsored by the Advanced Lab Physics Association and funded by the National Science Foundation.
    With curricular reform that involved Colgate professors Joe Amato and Beth Parks, Colgate students taking the first-semester physics course get a unique experience: an exposure to quantum mechanics with a lab on superposition. At the upper level, the curriculum is even more daring: “Colgate is only one of two schools in the country that has an actual laboratory section for Quantum Mechanics,” said Galvez. “Everywhere else, it’s just a theory course.”  

Intellectual nourishment for high school teachers
The words of Shakespeare, Saint Augustine, and John Perry echoed their wisdom anew as 16 high school teachers participated in Colgate’s annual Humanities Workshop for High School Teachers July 23 through 27.
    This year’s workshop centered on exploring literature with motifs pertaining to “Cultivating Memory, Creating Identity.” It was led by philosophy professors Ed Witherspoon and David McCabe, English professor Susan Cerasano, and French professor Patrick Riley. In selecting this year’s theme, the professors chose literary works that offer a window into the human identity, from The Merchant of Venice and Maus to The Ethics of Memory and A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality.


Colgate’s third-annual Humanities Workshop for High School Teachers (photo by Natalie Sportelli ’15)

    “We thought it was a good time to explore issues like: What is our identity as human individuals? and What is the community identity of a culture or a group?” said Witherspoon, the program’s director.     
    Witherspoon explained that the program aims to “provide [teachers with] intellectual nourishment and exploration of ideas that can guide their growth as educators.” He added that the workshop is meant to act as a springboard for sharing ideas, from educator to educator.
    The teachers, from high schools across upstate New York, gained a greater perspective into college and graduate-level teaching strategies of humanities-related course material.
    “[The workshop] offered me a chance to stretch my brain a little bit,” said Annalea Sininger, a teacher at Union-Endicott High School. “We think about higher philosophical questions, then look to see how we can bring them to a level where we can teach our students to read and think more deeply.”
    Since the workshop’s inception, attendance numbers have grown, with several Colgate alumni participating this summer. Teachers were able to join the program free of charge thanks to funding by Colgate’s Division of the Arts and Humanities, the Upstate Institute, the dean of the faculty, and departments within the humanities division.
— Natalie Sportelli ’15

Researching OCD treatment
Students working in neuroscience professor Deb Kreiss’s lab got firsthand experience treating their own obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) patients: lab rats. By inducing OCD-like symptoms in the rats, Kreiss and her students have conducted studies that will facilitate future development of better methods to treat the more than three million humans with OCD.

L to R: Professor Deb Kreiss, Jenny Panger ’15, and Lillian Laiks ’15 observe and record a lab rat’s obsessive behavior. (Photo by Natalie Sportelli ’15)

    The research builds on the theses of two Colgate graduates. Data from research in 2011 by students in Kreiss’s lab suggest that injecting rats with clomipramine (a drug used to treat OCD in humans) during the rats’ early lives (neonatal period) produces OCD-like behaviors when the rats reach adulthood. The researchers assessed a variety of OCD behaviors in the rats, including exploration in a maze, marble burying, and food hoarding.
    The researchers were able to see a significant difference in behavioral symptoms between lab rats treated with clomipramine during the neonatal period and control rats that received a placebo during the same early life stage. Further experiments on the rats in their adulthood by student researchers during summer 2012 revealed that medications used to treat OCD such as fluoxetin or Prozac made the neonatal-clomipramine–treated rats act more like the placebo-treated control rats.
    “It’s so interesting to see what is happening; you can’t ask a rat, ‘How do you feel about this, are you feeling a little OCD today?’” said research assistant Lillian Laiks ’15, who worked with Jenny Panger ’15 and Lauren Kasparson ’15 last summer.
    Now entering the second phase of their research, the team will investigate the harvested brains of the clomipramine-treated and control rats to determine the protein content of specific brain regions known to be altered in OCD patients. Similarities between abnormalities in the neural circuitry of clomipramine-treated rats and human OCD patients would support this protocol in rats as an effective animal model for testing future strategies for the treatment of OCD.
— Natalie Sportelli ’15

Diversity and Devotion in Utica
On a hot afternoon in July, young children sifted through clothing, household items, food, and toiletries in the Caring Corner at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Utica. Their families, mostly Karen refugees from Burma, are the newest, but largest, percentage of the church’s congregation.
    “Because the kids are the ones who speak English, many of them do the shopping for their families,” explained Nathan Lynch ’14. “The church converted their balcony into a store to give out supplies to the refugees because food stamps only go so far; plus, they can’t buy non-edibles with them.”

Native Americans perform at the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, one of the religious communities studied by Nathan Lynch ’14. (Photo by Nathan Lynch ’14)

    This scene of a religious institution addressing the needs of its shifting community is just one that Lynch witnessed while conducting research last summer on the melting pot of religious diversity found in Utica.
    Lynch, who wrote journalistic profiles that both reflect trends in the city and feed into the changes that are happening, said, “The city has a dynamic immigrant population that is filling the void left by the aging of other ethnic groups who traditionally resided there. So we’re seeing religious buildings, and even whole church denominations, start to cater to the needs of these new citizens.” A news editor at the Colgate Maroon-News, Lynch became interested in delving more deeply into this phenomenon after writing an article last fall for the paper’s “Portraits of Belief” — a series chronicling aspects of religion in the community. He wrote about a Bosnian Islamic group in Utica who purchased a former Methodist church and converted it into a mosque. “This was happening at the same time as the Ground Zero mosque debacle,” explained Lynch. “So, there were these two contrasting stories, one of controversy and this other of community support.” Religion professor Georgia Frank, who has visited the mosque in Utica with her classes, saw the article. “She told me, ‘You could turn this into a whole summer research project,’” Lynch said.
    In addition to interviewing clergy and congregation members, Lynch, an English/creative writing and history double major, attended services and Sunday schools, and did historical research to provide context to these contemporary situations. The Scarborough, Maine, resident kept a blog called Diversity and Devotion in Utica and hopes to publish his work in the Maroon-News, as well as in an external religion journal.
    Lynch, who pursued a youth-oriented angle for some of his profiles, said that two strong themes emerged: “One is of communities being revitalized and new congregations starting. The other is of walls of ethnicities breaking down.” In addition to Tabernacle Baptist Church, Lynch also profiled: a traditionally Syrian and Lebanese Antiochian Orthodox church that has attracted converts from many other religions and parts of the world; a Buddhist temple whose members are mainly Vietnamese; the increasingly diverse membership of the oldest, largest Catholic church in Utica; and two 19th-century women from the region canonized as Catholic saints this year, Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, and Marianne Cope, who ministered to lepers in Hawaii.
    Lynch’s portraits covered both the positives as well as the challenges and controversies faced by the communities, from poverty to cultural clashes.

These geology majors spent nearly six weeks in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains and several national parks over the summer as part of Geology 320: Techniques in Field Geology, taught by professors Karen Harpp, Amy Leventer, William Peck, and Bruce Selleck. In addition to the Rockies, the class conducted research at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho, Yellowstone National Park, the Flaming Gorge area of Utah, and the Wyoming Basin Province.  (Photo by William Peck)

Little white lies
We’ve all done it — when self-doubt creeps in before a big event, we pump ourselves up with inflated notions that may not be entirely accurate. Psychology professor Carrie Keating has been one of the researchers looking into this natural act of self-deception. In a recent study, she found that female students who take leadership positions on campus score higher on measures of self-deception.
    Women in leadership positions may have to “conveniently forget about some negatives [such as the fact that] women who behave in a dominant fashion may be perceived as more masculine,” Keating explained to the Wall Street Journal. Her research has also attracted the attention of Cosmopolitan.
    In another recent study led by Keating, women were instructed to sketch outlines of their bodies on sheets of paper. Then, some were asked to read a story about dating while the others were asked to read about buildings and architecture. When the women went back to the drawing board, those who had read about dating sketched themselves as slimmer compared to their earlier drawings. And those who read about architecture didn’t vary their sketches much. Keating believes that the women who drew themselves differently after reading the dating story actually perceived themselves that way because they “subscribed to the feminine thinness ideal and were motivated to block out perceived negative information about their bodies” in order to be more confident about dating.         
    Researchers don’t concur on what happens in the brain during self-deception. On the other hand, they do agree that while self-deception is common, it can beome an unhealthy habit if it spirals out of control.  

Exploring racial identity
For Kelsey John ’13, understanding and integrating her ethnic heritage has been a journey. “My parents always told me I was Navajo and a mix of European but never in a way that created a dichotomy,” she said. “I always felt like outsiders defined me differently even though I didn’t necessarily feel different.”

Kelsey John ’13
    Over the summer, John took an academic look at an intensely personal experience. In an attempt to look beyond well-established racial identity models, she sat down with several of her fellow biracial/multiracial Colgate undergraduates, listened to their identity stories, and noted how their narratives defy categorization. “A lot of models are very rigid, and they all seem to have a solid outcome,” said John. “What I’ve found in my own life is that there’s very rarely a solid outcome; it’s a fluid motion.”
    John piloted her project while traveling with Professor John Palmer and Colgate’s South Korea Study Group in fall 2011. During her months abroad, she conducted interviews with multiracial South Korean school students, surveying their conceptions of what it means to be Korean, or black, or white. “I wanted to take the idea and bring it back to Colgate and explore the identities of multiracial people on campus, because I believe they provide a unique perspective on how we think about race.”
    To gain access to that perspective, John developed interview questions based on her knowledge of current scholarship and the biographies of prominent biracial individuals.
    The answers she received highlighted the ongoing impact of racial classification. “We live in a world that still buys into the idea of racial categorization, whether biologically or socially constructed,” she said, “and this is what the students are touching on — that it is an oppressive mechanism.”
    But, she draws a positive conclusion from her transcripts: “These students are bringing new perspectives and new identities into the conversation, helping society think about race differently for the first time.”

Aveni to receive premier award
Professor Tony Aveni is the recipient of the 2013 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research, given to a scientist in recognition of interdisciplinary excellence that has contributed to American archaeology. Aveni, the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of astronomy and anthropology and Native American studies, will be given what has been called the premier award for interdisciplinary research in archaeology.
    Aveni will formally receive the award at the 78th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology next April in Honolulu. There will be a half-day symposium in his honor.



Syllabus

FSEM132, CORE139 Election Methods and Voting Techniques
Chris Nevison, professor of computer science
MWF 12:20-1:10, McGregory 320

Course description: This course gives us tools to assess the fairness of U.S. election methods and how policy decisions relate to the process in terms of both voting technology and different ways of conducting elections.

On the reading list:
Chaotic Elections, Donald Saari
Deliver the Vote, Tracy Campbell
Stealing Elections, John Fund
Electronic Elections, Michael Alvarez and Thad Hall

Key assignments and activities: Examination of case studies. Labs held to construct profiles on voting methods. End-of-semester debates.

The professor says: “Our course of study will lead to current debates about voting technology: How effective are different modern systems — such as electronically scanned paper ballots and direct recording electronic voting machines — for accurately and securely recording votes and protecting against voting fraud? How can we systematically compare and weigh the risks associated with different voting methods?”