Author Archives: Ann Aubry

Dey Wins 2009 Top Teaching Prize

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University’s Jonathan Dey, professor of biology and the Miner Linnaeus Sherff Professor of Botany, was named as the 2009 winner of The Pantagraph Award for Teaching Excellence at the University on Wednesday, April 16, at the annual Honors Convocation in Westbrook Auditorium of Presser Hall.

Listen to the award announcement or the Convocation address (mp3 files).

The $1,000 teacher-scholar award is the University’s top teaching honor and is sponsored by the daily newspaper headquartered in Bloomington that services eight counties and more than 60 communities in Central Illinois. The honoree is selected by Illinois Wesleyan’s Promotion and Tenure Committee based on nominations received from members of the faculty.

Dey has traveled the country in his studies of botany, and has discovered, described and named several lichens through his research. A graduate of Oregon State and Duke universities, his doctoral research centered on lichens of high mountain areas of the Southern Appalachians in North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Beginning his career as a secondary school teacher in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, Dey came to Illinois Wesleyan in 1974. Known on campus for his dedication to his students, he has lead them into fieldwork for decades. “He embodies the spirit of John Wesley Powell, that is his apparent beliefs that work in the field is vital for students to learn about the natural world,” said Provost Beth Cunningham, comparing Dey to the famed explorer and former Illinois Wesleyan professor, who was the first to lead students on field trips in the 1800s. “Dr. Dey has taken students to places such as the Alleghenies upland area of West Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee nearly every summer, where students have the opportunity to work side-by-side with him.” She added he is known as a mentor to both students and fellow faculty members.

Record-Breaking Grant Supports Research Using Virtual Reality to Examine Sexual Choices

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Virtual reality may be able to transform people into a world of fantasy, but an Illinois Wesleyan University faculty member is hoping it will lead to real-world answers to help fight the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Assistant Professor of Psychology Natalie Smoak is co-recipient of a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the largest grant in the history of the University, that will use virtual reality to study how people make health decisions that could lead to sexually transmitted diseases (STD), including the transmission of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS.

Recent studies from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimate one in four teenagers in the United States carries an STD. Smoak believes the statistics reflect an attitude of invincibility that can harm students. “Students don’t think they need to use condoms. They think they can tell by looking at someone if they have a sexually transmitted disease, which we know is rarely the case,” said Smoak. The CDC, which promotes condom use as a highly effective STD prevention method, also estimates 40,000 people become infected each year with HIV.

Smoak and Kerry Marsh, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, will enlist the help of virtual reality to place people in social situations and study their reactions, seeing whether they make safer sex-related decisions. “Studying people’s sexual choices is not like studying fitness, where you can walk down to the local gym and observe behavior,” said Smoak of choosing virtual reality for the five-year program of research. “You can’t really follow people around at parties to observe their choices.”

One of the goals of the study is to see if risky sexual decisions are based upon environmental cues or personality. “Do young people happen to be in environments that facilitate risky decisions or is it a matter of individuals with certain personalities looking for less safe environments?” said Smoak. “This study will help us know whether it is better to intervene on an environmental or a personal level to promote safer choices.”

Alumnus Stars in “The Visitor”

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — There was a little bit of Illinois Wesleyan amid the glitz and glamour of the April 1 premiere of The Visitor. The film’s leading man, Richard Jenkins, appeared on the red carpet at the New York City Museum of Modern Art alongside wife Sharon (Friedrick) Jenkins. Both are theatre arts graduates from Wesleyan’s Class of 1969.

But the Wesleyan connections don’t end there: Jenkins’ co-star Danai Gurira is the daughter of 1967 IWU graduate Josephine (Chiza) Gurira, who now lives in Zimbabwe. The Visitor is Danai Gurira’s first film, although she has guest-starred on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent.”

Early reviews for The Visitor were positive, with Variety’s John Anderson calling the film “a perfect vehicle for Richard Jenkins” and predicting that it “could be this year’s humanistic indie hit,” adding “Jenkins has hooked us early and reels us in like fish.” Paul Brownfield of the Los Angeles Times praised Jenkins’ ability to portray characters whose “dry, even ordinary qualities” strike a “countervailing note in a larger, more hectic world.”

“Oddly for Hollywood, Jenkins seems — just now, at 60 — to be hitting his movie prime,” Brownfield concluded.

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference Features Keynote on Antarctica

The annual John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference will be held at Illinois Wesleyan University on Saturday, April 12 from 8:30 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. in the Center for Natural Science Learning and Research (CNS) (201 Beecher St., Bloomington).

Presentations are free and open to the public.

A unique opportunity for undergraduates to be recognized for their research endeavors, the 2008 conference program will include 85 poster presentations and 26 oral presentations from a broad range of disciplines including Economics, Environmental Studies, Greek and Roman Studies, Theatre, Biology, and Business Administration. Research posters will be displayed in either the morning or afternoon according to the number each is assigned, while the 15-minute oral presentations are organized into ten sessions. A numbered list of poster presentations is available at http://www2.iwu.edu/jwprc/2008ParticipantList.pdf, and a schedule of oral presentations is available at http://www2.iwu.edu/jwprc/oral.shtml.

The keynote address of the conference, titled “‘Who Goes There?’: Science and Belonging in Contemporary Antarctica,” will be delivered by Elena Glasberg from Princeton University. Glasberg was awarded an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Grant by the National Science Foundation. An interdisciplinary humanist, Glasberg works in the fields of American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and her creative writing courses at Princeton focus on the Antarctic.

Glasberg has been director of the Program in the Study of Sexuality and of the New Beginnings Faculty Research Program at Duke University; a research affiliate at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; and a faculty affiliate at New York University’s Center for the History of the Production of Knowledge.

She has published widely and is currently working on a book for the University of New England Press. Another New World: Antarctica as Place and Symbol in the United States investigates the ways U.S. subjects since 1820 have projected onto Antarctica fantasies and beliefs about land, knowledge, and power that cannot be brought under national control. By placing discourse about Antarctica before, beside, and after that of the U.S., Another New World reconsiders American empire via its relations to a fantastic Antarctic that, through the accident of geophysical reality, seemed always—and still—to await explorers and colonizers.

Glasberg’s appearance at the 2008 conference is timely in this International Polar Year.

An annual event since 1990, the research conference was named after explorer-geologist John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran and a founder of the National Geographic Society who joined IWU’s faculty in 1865. Powell was the first U.S. professor to use fieldwork to teach science, taking IWU students on an expedition to Colorado’s mountains. Powell was later the first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology.

Rincker Wins Prize for Research on Women in Developing Democracies

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Illinois Wesleyan University Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Meg Rincker has been honored for her collaborative research on women’s pathways to political influence in new and developing democracies.

Rincker and her colleague, Candice Ortbals of Pepperdine University, were recently awarded the 2007 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics for their ongoing research studying the effectiveness of women’s organizations in countries with authoritarian histories, including Pakistan and Chile.

“Carrie Chapman Catt was one of the most charismatic leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States,” said Rincker, who will use the $1,000 prize to continue surveys of women in Pakistan. “To receive an award in her name is a huge honor.”

The Catt prize, awarded annually for more than a decade, seeks to support research on women and politics in an ongoing effort to promote collaboration between political practitioners and academic researchers.

IWU Awarded Grant to Expand Student Advising

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Illinois Wesleyan University has been awarded a $200,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which will enable the University to implement an Advising Center on campus.

The Foundations, which concentrate on privately governed, four-year, liberal arts institutions, seek to support solid universities acknowledged for academic excellence.

The new Advising Center, which should be in place in fall of 2008, will provide a valuable resource for students and faculty, said Assistant Provost and Registrar Jeff Frick. “We are always looking for ways to make the experience of attending Illinois Wesleyan as smooth as possible.” The Office of the Registrar will oversee the new Advising Center. “This grant will enable us to offer more extensive help to our student population.”

The University will not be moving away from faculty-led advising, said Frick, rather it will support our faculty members in their knowledge of current requirements within departments. In addition, the University will institute a second-year advising program for students who have an undeclared major, which is modeled after the strong first-year advising program. “Faculty will still be very much involved in the process of helping students understand the academic programs,” said Frick. “The grant will allow us to hold workshops and training sessions which further sharpens our faculty members’ engagement in academic advising.”

Student Studies Effects of Potential Alzheimer’s Drug on Rats

Illinois Wesleyan University student Andrew Tharp and Renee Countryman, assistant professor of psychology, have been conducting research related to newer pharmaceutical treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Tharp, a senior psychology major from Lake in the Hills, Ill., and Countryman are studying the effects of the drug Guanfacine on rats with induced memory deficiencies similar to Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s disease, a brain disorder that usually affects people age 65 and older, causes memory loss and behavioral issues associated with dementia.

A known cause of Alzheimer’s symptoms is a decrease of acetylcholine in the brain. Acetylcholine, a chemical neurotransmitter, carries messages between neurons and other cells. In order to mimic this condition in rats Tharp and Countryman administered a drug that decreases acetylcholine thereby affecting the rats’ memory.

According to Countryman, current drugs are designed to increase the level of acetylcholine in the brain by inhibiting an enzyme that normally functions to destroy any excess amounts of acetylcholine. However, as Alzheimer’s disease progresses, acetylcholine naturally becomes less available in the brain. Drugs that inhibit this enzyme eventually become ineffective when there is little or no acetylcholine left to prevent from being destroyed.

“The problem is Alzheimer’s treatments just don’t work for humans in the long-term, they may work for a short period, but they always stop working over time,” says Countryman.

The drug that Tharp and Countryman are studying, however, takes a different approach to improving memory loss by focusing on a different neurotransmitter. Guanfacine increases the levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, associated with attention and awareness. By increasing norepinephrine levels in the brain, the drug boosts attention and awareness thereby enhancing perceptions and hopefully improving memory.

Judy Huff Wins Starkey Award for Service to University

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Judy Huff, the senior office coordinator for Illinois Wesleyan University’s Center for Natural Sciences, has been named the 2008 winner of the University’s Max. L. Starkey Service Award at the 17th annual recognition banquet at Bloomington’s Double Tree Hotel on Wednesday, March 26.

Huff, who has been with Illinois Wesleyan since 1990, helps to support five departments on campus and more than 50 faculty members. She was recognized for tireless dedication and strong work ethic, and is considered a vital resource to both students and faculty members.

The Starkey Award, established in 2001, is presented to a member of the administrative, technical, support, security or physical plant staffs nominated by his or her peers for extraordinary service. The award is named in honor of the late Max Starkey, a 1957 Illinois Wesleyan graduate who was University comptroller from 1957 to 1996.

The banquet recognized members of the IWU community for their work throughout the year and included a special tribute to employees who celebrated milestone anniversaries in five-year increments.

Alumna Receives Toxicology Award

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Kylee Eblin, a 2003 graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University, received the Society of Toxicology’s Women in Toxicology Student Achievement Award on Wednesday, March 19.

Currently a pharmacology and toxicology doctoral student at The University of Arizona College of Pharmacy, Eblin is focusing her research on the potentially carcinogenic effects of low-level arsenic exposure on bladder cells.

Eblin is one of three students nationwide selected for the award given by The Society of Toxicology, the leading organization dedicated to creating a safer and healthier world by advancing the science of toxicology.

Chemistry Major Will Present Research on Capitol Hill

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University student Jamie Rogers has been chosen by the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) to present her research on Capitol Hill at the annual Posters on the Hill session in April.

Rogers, a senior chemistry major from St. Louis, is one of 60 students from across the nation who has been invited to Washington, D.C. According to CUR, which hosts the event, Posters on the Hill allows members of Congress to gain an understanding of the importance of funding undergraduate scientific research.

“Undergraduate research can sometimes be forgotten because it is not on the vast scale of graduate schools,” said Rogers. “But quality undergraduate programs like Illinois Wesleyan are key building blocks for all students. I know this presentation is important not just for me, but for all future undergraduate students.”

Rogers will present a poster of her research on “Environmentally Friendly Organic Synthesis Using Bismuth Compounds” that will be viewed by U.S. Senators during the Posters on the Hill session. “The research is about achieving chemical reactions in a green way, using a catalyst like bismuth bromide. Catalysts make reactions go more smoothly. A green catalyst means it is better for the environment and the chemists working with them,” said Rogers, who works on the project with Illinois Wesleyan chemistry Professor Ram Mohan.

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