Photo Albums

Assistant Professor of Biology Patrick Burton and his students study sea anemomes.
“Why, you might ask,” Professor Burton said, “would we be studying marine life in the middle of Indiana?
“I’m a developmental biologist, and a sea anemone can develop its body in three different ways,” Burton said. Those developmental abilities—embryonic, regeneration, and asexual fission—also make studying such animals important in an age of cloning and, in particular, growing organs and tissue.
Burton and his students have been using the drug alsterpaullone to manipulate head and tentacle development in sea anenomes and have been studying their results. They have learned that the drug decreased tentacle development and increased head development by turning off the Wnt signaling pathway for one, and not the other.
One of the anemones they created using these manipulations had three "heads," hence the title of the professor's talk, "A Modern Cerberus: The Creation of a Three-Headed Anemone."
When Professor Burton projected the image on the screen, he said, "Behold the hellhound of Wabash!"

Professor of Modern Languages Gilberto Gomez spent last year as resident director at Waseda University in Japan, the fifth Wabash faculty member to do so during a sabbatical year.
Professor Gomez offered an impressive list of alumni of the school of more than 50,000 students, including the co-founder of Sony and CEOs and former CEOs of many Japan’s largest corporations.
He said he enjoyed his year in Japan and recommended the program for Wabash and other students. 

Professor Gomez also described some of the challenges students face adjusting to Japanese culture.
“The Japanese educational system has a strong emphasis on uniformity,” Gomez said, which can be a challenge for American students.
Then there are interesting, often confusing translations for those who have not yet learned Japanese. Professor Gomez offered the example above.

 

Professor and Glee Club Director Richard Bowen presented a photo essay of sorts, describing the most meaningful moments of the Glee Club’s tour of Ecuador this summer as images from the trip were projected on a screen. He told of the group’s first concert, at Ecuador’s equivalent of West Point, and how Professor Dan Rogers’ suggestion that they sing the Ecuadorian national anthem brought such an enthusiastic and appreciative response. He recalled an impromptu concert at school near the hotel in which the group stayed, and of working and singing in a small Ecuadorian village. Read the Glee Club and Professor Bowen's blog from the trip here.
 

"Time after time during our Ecuador tour, we were embraced by our audiences, we were treated warmly, we were granted 'access' to a deeper level of personal interaction than might be expected under the circumstances,” Professor Bowen said. "Why was this? Our music was a critical factor. We went to Ecuador to sing for people. That is to say, we were there not just to 'take in' the scenery, sights, sounds, and delicacies of the country, but we were there to give something. And – while the 'something' we had to give was rather intangible — what we gave was something that no amount of money can purchase—something of our very selves.” Read Professor Bowen's blog entry about the trip here. 

Can showing a picture of a little boy smiling with his mother to a group of kindergarteners really encourage them to be more helpful to one another? That’s one of the questions Assistant Professor of Psychology Eric Olofson hopes to answer in one of two of his research projects examining social cognition and behavior in young children. Olofson described an ongoing research project he and his students are working on in which one group of Crawfordsville kindergarteners is shown a photo of a smiling but solitary boy. The other group is shown a photo of the same boy smiling with his mother. In previous research, the second picture has been shown to increase the likelihood of kindergarteners helping one another, and Olofson and his students are testing that theory with their study of local schoolkids. “Our hope is that simply putting up the picture will increase pro-social behavior in the classroom,” Olofson said. Read more about the project here.
 

 Olofson and his students’ other project is utilizing parents’ knowledge of their children to help us understand how and when young children develop social skills.
“All the data up till now has not tapped into what parents know about their child’s social skills,” Olofson said. He and his collaborators wanted to develop a questionnaire for parents that would get at that parental knowledge. And they wanted to find the questions whose answers would correlate with the child’s social development as based on a set of tasks researchers gave the children.
Presenting results of the study, Olofson believes they've done exactly that. 
"We seem to have developed a questionnaire that we can give to parents and teachers to help them understand the social skills of that particular child."

 

Professor of Biology Eric Wetzel joked that he could understand why his talk had not been scheduled right before lunch—some of the images he showed of parasitic infections in children and adults in Peru were unsettling. The statistics were moreso: more than two million deaths from mosquito-borne malaria and more than one billion people infected with roundworms worldwide. "These parasites cause disability, disfigurement, disease, delayed growth and development,” Wetzel said. “They are both the result and the cause of poverty.” Wetzel, who spent last spring in Peru, has seen the suffering up close. He has been trying to develop a global health initiative at Wabash that would include research and service, drawing on the liberal arts and the College’s mission statement “to live humanely.” The program would involve students, faculty and staff, and alumni in learning about global health issues. It would involve students in service and community development projects related to global health, including work in Peru and addressing the problems of parasites and disease there. Toward the end of his time in Peru, Wetzel said he was meeting with village leaders and discussing the problems they face and the program Wetzel hopes to develop. He recalled that "one of the men came up to me and said, ‘We are asking for your mercy.’" Read Professor Wetzel's blog from his time in Peru here.

Professor of English Warren Rosenberg has been teaching his Men and Masculinities course since 1993. The course has been not only well-received by students, but often mentioned as a life-changer during students’ time here. But Professor Rosenberg wants to know if the course has had long term effects on his former students, and he’s been gathering past and current students' comments on the course for several years now.

During Friday’s presentation, Professor Rosenberg shared email from an alumnus who said, “The course made me question the stereotypical male role that I had grown up with” and “that that Men and Masculinities was no doubt the foundation of my interest in the subject.”   “The responses I’ve received have been gratifying,” Rosenberg said. But when he wanted to hear from more of the 89 alumni who had taken the course, his letters and emails were to no avail.
 

Enter Professor Rosenberg's research assistant, Joey Fleenor ’12 and Facebook.
Fleenor said his first task (after analyzing previous interviews) was to develop a database to work from. Then came the problem of how to increase response rate.
“I told Dr. Rosenberg, ‘Why don’t we try Facebook,” Fleenor said. They’ve since heard from 22 more of the alumni.
 

Teaching a biology-based subject like sense and perception to psychology students can be a challenge. “Students often feel ‘this isn’t psychology,” Assistant Professor of Psychology Karen Gunther said during presentation, "The Use of Non-Fiction Novels in a Sensation and Perception Course." She has devised a way she hopes will make the material more interesting while emblazoning it more deeply on her students’ memories. Instead of a textbook to explore the subjects of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, she uses what she calls “non-fiction novels” to deliver the information and pique students' interest.. Thus far she’s introduced students to The Island of the Color Blind, by Oliver Sacks and Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr. And the students like it. In subjective questionnaires, two-thirds of her class preferred the non-fiction novel approach. Her objective tests, however, showed "no huge improvement" on the exams. Professor Gunther plans to continue the experiment, though. “The books get them more excited about the subject and psychology, which is a benefit in itself.”

How do you piece together a narrative of 32-years of your life’s work? sThat was the dilemma facing archaeologist and LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Leslie Day as she began to write her book about the site that made her name in archaeological circles and continues to tell scholars more about the people who lived there during the "Dark Ages" of Crete. Most books about such sites tell the story from the dig's perspective—inventorying every find, piece by piece, highlighting the best of them. But Professor Day wanted something different; something “that would concentrate on the people who lived there and their history, not on the cleverness of the archaeologist.” She organized her book so that readers go room to room, envisioning the place as it might have been for those who lived there. The first volume—Kavousi IIA: The Late Minoan IIIC Settlement at Vronda. The Buildings on the Summit—was published last year. “I hope I’m creating a compelling narrative that will be a service to the people of ancient Kavousi, who could not write, to bring their stories and history to light.” Read more about Professor Day here. Click here to read a blog by Professor Day and her Wabash students written during a recent immersion learning experience in Kavousi.