Click the photo to see what exciting memorabilia Meg Miner – University Archivist & Special Collections Librarian – has requested.

Brooke Trantor will perform in the Second City Hollywood hit show “Undateable” on Dec. 6 and 13.

Catherine Bayles (Cate) ’11, a recent graduate of Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, is education program coordinator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis.

Maggie Byrne completed Fuego y Agua,a rigorous ultramarathon in a scenic Nicaragua, overlooking tropical birds and howler monkeys.  Byrne finished the race in nine hours and 33 minutes, coming in 10th position among the women. “It felt a level of energy I never imagined possible,” she said. A cross-country runner at Illinois Wesleyan University, Byrne from Chicago, graduated summa cum laude with an educational study major with a double minor in English and Spanish. She is now a Peace Corps volunteer and works as an environmental educator in Nicaragua.

Byrne teaching 6th grade students

 Byrne with an eco-stove she built

Nicholas Goble recently received “The Graduate Dean’s Instructional Excellence Award” for Physics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH.  He is working towards a doctorate in Experimental Physics at Case.

Brooke Trantor recently graduated from Second City Hollywood’s Conservatory, where she studied improvisational and sketch comedy in addition to working as a producer, intern, house manager and box office employee.  Brooke has been recently accepted into the Groundlings School, a Los Angeles improv program whose graduates include Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig and Phil Hartman. “I hope to continue to hone my craft,” she says. “You have to have the confidence in yourself. I hope to continue in the comedy world, and obviously I’ll keep doing that, but I also want to dive into TV and writing and submerge myself in everything that’s going on around me.”

Illinois Wesleyan University alumna Anna Groves of Naperville, Ill., class of 2011, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. Groves is currently a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in plant biology at Michigan State University.  An environmental studies major at Illinois Wesleyan, Groves is now a graduate student at Michigan State’s Brudvig lab in plant biology. The lab’s central research uses basic ecological concepts to inform restoration practices, while using restoration as a system to learn more about ecology.

“I’m broadly interested in why restoration projects don’t always turn out the way we want them to,” said Groves. “If we can’t rebuild an ecosystem, then we don’t know enough about its ecology.”

More specifically, Groves’ research questions consider whether the establishment phase of a restoration (clearing existing vegetation and then seeding a prairie, for example) or the later ongoing management (burning or manual brush removal in the prairie) has a greater impact on restoration outcomes.

“Both are known to be important, but sorting out the effects of each and the interaction between the two will have important implications for land managers with limited resources,” said Groves.

As an undergraduate at Illinois Wesleyan, Groves conducted a research project analyzing population levels of red-tailed hawks and American kestrels and their relation to latitude using five years of winter raptor survey data. R. Given Harper, George C. and Ella Beach Lewis Endowed Chair of Biology at IWU, served as her undergraduate research advisor. Groves was named the outstanding student in environmental studies in 2011.