The Art of Science
friday, september 28, 2007
So much happened on campus this past week that I will have to pass over several possible topics to focus on one whose importance is impossible to overstate: we broke ground on Thursday for a new $34 million science center that will transform our campus in manifold ways!
As anyone who attended the event can attest, it was truly a “ceremonial” groundbreaking. We all knew that shiny shovels hitting an oversized sandbox was only a signifier of the earth-moving efforts ahead. But I’d like to reflect a little on how this event was also a sign of much past work. Indeed, I daresay that science faculty at Stonehill have been groundbreakers since the College opened its doors, and that this new building is the culmination of their efforts.
Many of the names in Stonehill’s lore involve scientists: Fr. Frank Hurley C.S.C., the “Father of Biology”; Mary Alice Moore, the chemist who dared--according to the stories--to destroy her lab furnishings in order to get students what they needed to do science; Chet Raymo, whose love for physics and astronomy drew generations of students to his classes, where he raised their sights to the night skies and beyond in the Merkert-Tracy observatory.
The new Science Center will house four academic departments: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Psychology. These departments sponsor majors in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, environmental studies, neuroscience, and psychology--and soon a full-fledged physics major. The current faculty is simply outstanding, and the College has recognized this: these departments boast five faculty recipients of the Louise Hegarty Award for Excellence in Teaching and two recipients of the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award. (That’s one quarter of the teaching award recipients and one third of the distinguished faculty scholars!)
They have brought millions of dollars in external grant funding to support their research--and this has been happening in an environment where it is increasingly difficult to attract federal dollars for research. National Science Foundation (NSF) funding supports the honey-mushroom research of Diane Peabody. Robert Peabody, Maura Tyrell, and Jane DeLuca; NSF also supports Louis Liotta’s ongoing research on Polyhydroxylated pyrrolidines.
Marilena Hall and Cheryl Schnitzer have received substantial funding from Research Corporation to support their basic research. Mike Horne and Alessandro Massarotti enjoy remarkable collaborations with scholars at institutions including MIT and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In addition to these salient examples of specific research projects, these departments have also brought in matching funds for new instrumentation, such as a high-speed nuclear-magnetic resonator and a DNA sequencer. In the case of Chemistry, a whole department collaborated to acquire funding that fosters pedagogical change: we are in the second year of an NSF grant in excess of $860,000 that supports a substantial revision to the way we deliver General Chemistry. These are just a few examples of such work.
Even more importantly, these faculty members have shaped the lives of countless students by leading the rest of us in many of the most important academic directions we have taken in the last two decades: experiential learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and undergraduate research. Each of these departments has consistently been a “hands-on” department, where students learn science by doing science. Their labs and research facilities are hubs of activity--as are many corners of the physical campus--where students take pride in the record numbers of hours they log on their laboratory or environmental work. Three of the nine interdisciplinary majors at Stonehill are offered through these departments. And undergraduate research, which we are now proud to offer in every discipline, began with the sciences. Some of that research is course based; for example, 100% of Psychology students design their own research projects through the Research Methods class. And much of the research also involves the direct collaboration of a student and a faculty member. Indeed, it was Louis Liotta who brought the idea of the SURE program to Stonehill, and since 1996, the number and variety of projects has grown each year, as today’s SURE Poster Presentation demonstrated.
To call these steps in Stonehill’s remarkable progress would be an understatement; to call them quantum leaps would be a cliché. The truth is, our science faculty have broken new ground at Stonehill, and they’ve done it in spades. This week, they also did it with spades, and the Science Center that will open in Summer 2009 represents an another acknowledgement of their work--one that we will all have the opportunity to enjoy.
Best regards,
Katie