Rick Peterson

Author: Rick Peterson

Science “evangelist” Ainissa Ramirez delivers “Technology’s Unexpected Consequences” convocation

Self-proclaimed science “evangelist” Ainissa Ramirez preaches a gospel focused on the importance of improving the public’s understanding of science.

Ramirez shares her message in the Lawrence University convocation “Technology’s Unexpected Consequences” Tuesday, April 3 at 11:10 a.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. She will conduct a question-and-answer-session following her remarks. Both events are free and open to the public.

Through books, TED Talks, online videos and the podcast “Science Underground,” Ramirez makes her case for science education reform, arguing for greater emphasis on problem solving and critical thinking rather than memorization.

According to Ramirez, “STEM is like a training camp for key skills like encouraging curiosity and patience and making friends with failure. Most of the jobs of the 21st century will require people to be comfortable with science and math, not only the content and information, but the mindset that comes from these fields, such as trial-and-error and the skill of asking good questions.”

Ramirez, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Brown University and a Ph.D. at Stanford University, spent eight years on the faculty at Yale University, where she taught mechanical engineering and materials science and created a science lecture series for kids called “Science Saturdays.” She also spent time as a visiting professor at MIT.

Named one of the world’s 100 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review for her contributions to transforming technology, Ramirez holds six patents and is the author of co-author of three books, including “Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists.” Her most recent book, 2013’s “Newton’s Football: The Science Behind America’s Game,” uses football as a model to examine science topics ranging from chaos theory to concussions, in an entertaining, big-think way.

About Lawrence University
Founded in 1847, Lawrence University uniquely integrates a college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, both devoted exclusively to undergraduate education. It was selected for inclusion in the book “Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College.” Engaged learning, the development of multiple interests and community outreach are central to the Lawrence experience. Lawrence draws its 1,500 students from nearly every state and more than 50 countries.

New Wriston Art Center exhibition features work by Anna Campbell, Benjamin Rinehart and Zina Mussmann

Sculptor Anna Campbell opens Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center Galleries’ latest exhibition with a discussion of her show “Apparatus for a Dream Sequence” Thursday, March 29 at 6 p.m. A reception follows Campbell’s remarks. Both are free and open to the public. The new exhibition runs through May 6.

Artist Anna Campbell's "chosenname" — Anna Campbell’s “chosenname” is part of her “Apparatus of a Dream Sequence” exhibition.

An associate professor of art and design at Grand Valley State University, Campbell employs props, scaffold and trusswork in her work to explore social constructions, lived experience, and the labor of constructing a utopian future. Through brilliantly varnished marquetry and faceted, gilded cordial glasses, she gestures toward a luxurious and comfortable social space. Her show’s title refers to the diverse terms that generations of LGBT and other marginalized people have used to mark the labor of making and naming home.

“Campbell’s installations are both sensorially enticing and intentionally subversive,” said Beth Zinsli, director and curator of the Wriston Art Center Galleries. “They’re designed to make the viewer think carefully about language, names, pleasure, labor, comfort and to question their assumptions about those ideas.”

The pop-up book "Team Ramey" — Benjamin Rinehart’s “Team Ramey” will be among the pieces featured in the exhibition “Art of the Book.”

The exhibition “Art of the Book” features works from Lawrence’s own Seeley G. Mudd Library’s Art of the Book collection. Started in 2011, the collection features 63 titles, with several new ones added year year. Among the numerous artists included in the exhibition is Lawrence Associate Professor of Art Benjamin Rinehart and his pop-up book “Team Ramey.”

Painter Zina Mussmann, a faculty member at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design whose work has been exhibited regionally and nationally, presents “Unto Itself: New work by Zina Mussmann.” Referring to the ways micro and macroscopic scientific images awake a new type of existential anxiety, “Unto Itself” features more than two dozen drawings, including watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite on white paper, from Mussmann’s 2016 series “Automata.”

Art drawing "Automata" — Automata #6, mixed media on Paper will be part of the “Unto Itself: New work by Zina Mussmann” exhibition.

According to Mussman, “science has revealed systems that are autopoetic, existing within us on the tiniest of scales and all around us in seemingly infinite space and time. The drawings in this series purposefully reveal and conceal the structure of these systems; they are not faithful representations, rather they beg the question of what is still unseen. What is still hidden from us in the ether? And how will that continue to challenge human primacy?”

The Wriston Art Center is open Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday noon – 4 p.m.; closed Mondays. Free and open to the public.

Virtuoso percussionist Colin Currie performs at Lawrence March 30

Embracing new music at its highest level, Scotland native Colin Currie brings his dynamic percussion talents to the Lawrence Memorial Chapel Friday, March 30 at 8 p.m. in the third concert of Lawrence University’s 2017-18 Artist Series.

Tickets for the performance, at $25-30 for adults, $20-25 for seniors, $18-20 for students, are available through the Lawrence Box Office, 920-832-6749.

Colin Curie with mallets — Percussion virtuoso Colin Currie performs March 30 in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel.

A percussion virtuoso, Currie has established himself as the soloist of choice for many of today’s foremost composers, especially the innovative Stephen Reich, the father of minimalism. He has had the honor of performing premieres of works by nearly 20 contemporary composers.

Music professor Dane Richeson, who directs Lawrence’s percussion studio, calls Currie “one of the leading percussion soloists in the world.”

“Colin has truly championed the expansion of new compositions for contemporary percussion soloist and ensemble,” said Richeson. “Colin, along with Evelyn Glennie, are the most widely known and successful solo percussion artists in the world of contemporary music. It’s exciting and an honor to have him perform at Lawrence.”

Growing up, Currie played principal timpani and percussion with both the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the European Union Youth Orchestra. He has been recognized with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award in 2000 and its Instrumentalist Award in 2015, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist between 2003-2005 and received a Bortletti Buitoni Trust Award, which honors performers of exceptional quality and musicianship, in 2005.

Currie launched his own eponymous record label last fall and released its first recording, Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” earlier this month.

He has held an appointment as a visiting professor of solo percussion at London’s Royal Academy of Music, is an Artist-in-Association at London’s Southbank Centre and is in the final year of a three-year Artist-in-Residence appointment with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra.

Creating Play Around the World: Senior Eli Cauley awarded $30,000 fellowship for “wanderjahr”

While growing up in New York City, Eli Cauley lived in a home without a television. Unlike many kids his age, he wasn’t raised with an X-Box or PlayStation at the ready.

But that never stopped his passion for playing and making games.

“When people ask me about games, I immediately perk up. I love playing and I especially love creating them,” said the Lawrence University senior. “But if I’m asked ‘what do you like playing?,’ I trip. I don’t really play ‘Grand Theft Auto’ or the newest ‘Call of Duty,’ not even ‘Skyrim.’ They haven’t held my attention lately.

“The names of the games I’ve been playing recently probably wouldn’t mean much to most people,” he added. “I enjoy playing more intimate games, ones often developed by small teams or even just one creator whose personality can be felt in the game.”

What Cauley most enjoys is the process of creating ingenious games and then sharing them with others to play. With a fertile imagination, an insightful mind and computer software as his tools, Cauley has designed some 30 games — 17 of which are available online — under the pseudonym “crawlspace.”

“Not all of them have the interactive systems people have come to expect. Many of them are neither winnable nor losable. But I hope to open people’s perspective of what games can be and do,” said Cauley, who traces his game-making interests to elementary school, where he would scribble elaborate simulations of medieval kingdoms for his friends to play in.

Following his graduation from Lawrence this June, Cauley will spend a year pursuing his passion for games and exploring the world’s gaming community as one of 40 national recipients of a $30,000 Watson Fellowship for a wanderjahr of independent travel and exploration. Beginning this August, Cauley’s 12-month itinerary includes stops in England, the Netherlands and Japan.

Last summer, Cauley attended a virtual reality workshop at New York University, a Game Developers of Color Exposition in Harlem and spent time at an outdoor arcade gallery where he played a historical fiction time travel game about Walt Whitman.

“What I experienced that summer was just a small taste of the diversity and richness of video games and their developers that exists around the world,” said Cauley, Lawrence’s 73nd Watson Fellow since the program’s inception in 1969. “For my Watson project, I hope to follow this thread around the world, exploring the exciting and diverse game makers who exist outside the traditional game development world.”

He will begin is exploration in London, where he will spend time with two open communities: the London Game Space, a roving community of game developers who co-work in various spaces around the city; and Video Brains, an organization dedicated to fostering intellectually engaged conversations about video games and game development. He’s also hoping to meet Stephen Lavelle — aka Increpare — a prolific game developer with hundreds of published games to his credit of varying sizes touching upon a diverse range of unorthodox subjects.

“If I could have coffee with Stephen Lavelle, just for an afternoon, that would be amazing,” said Cauley, a linguistics major at Lawrence with a 3.94 grade point average. “His games are why I create games.”

“Eli’s games are innovative, thought-provoking, deceptively simple and great fun to play. He’s extremely intelligent and self-motivated. He’s also a very kind, thoughtful person who wants to help make a better, more inclusive, more equitable world.
— Lavayna Proctor

From December to April, Cauley will live in the Netherlands, home to a growing community of independent game developers thanks to the launch of the Dutch Game Garden in 2008.

“They offer very practical services surrounding the business end of being a game developer, but the part of the Game Garden that interests me is their bottom-up grassroots effort to create at thriving, diverse community of developers. I plan on attending their open game jams, hack-a-thon inspired game-making events and other community-based events,” said Cauley.

The final three months of his project will be spent in Japan, primarily in Tokyo, home to a large indie games festival, and Kyoto, where he’s attend BitSummit, a games’ festival organized by the Japanese Independent Games Aggregate. He also plans to visit Fukushima and hopes to attend their yearly Fukushima game jam.

“In past years the game jam has centered around themes of ‘rise’ and ‘rebirth’ in the wake of the tragic disaster,” said Cauley. “The jam provides a unique space to learn how games might participate in a community’s process of healing.”

Lavanya Proctor, assistant professor of anthropology and Cauley’s academic advisor, said he “has always been very passionate about creating games.”

“Eli’s games are innovative, thought-provoking, deceptively simple and great fun to play,” said Proctor. “He’s extremely intelligent and self-motivated. He’s also a very kind, thoughtful person who wants to help make a better, more inclusive, more equitable world.

“His Watson project aims to help him do that, channeling his love for creating games and his passion for learning into his goal of helping build equity,” she added. “This fellowship will help Eli learn from diverse and independent creators, enriching his creativity and deepening his commitment to inclusivity. I’m very proud of him.”

Cauley says his career at Lawrence has produced some self-induced conflict. He’s been a diligent student, excited about his studies, classes and professors. He’s also been an autodidact, spending every sliver of his free time studying the complicated tools required to navigate a modern game engine — coding, animation rigging, homebrew plug-ins, physics systems and countless bug fixes.

“I’ve been the game maker desperately trying to figure out where games fit into my life. I’ve wondered if my games were just an amusing past time or creations full of inside jokes I showed to my friends for quick laughs. Did games fit into my academic life when I wrote a literary critique of a Chekhov short story in the form of an interactive essay game or were they a vehicle to return to art and tap into a creative energy I hadn’t felt since my childhood? I rejected every hypothesis because each was only half true. None provided the satisfaction I started to see in the games I was creating.”

As his skills became more sophisticated and his mind ran flush with ideas, Cauley began making games as art, eulogy, therapy, birthday gifts, educational devices, love letters, apologies, games to deliver a literary critique or explore family dynamics or simulate theoretical physics.

Icons of games created by Eli Cauley — Two of the games created by Cauley include Ben Tortilla Simulator Alpha 1.0 (left), in which you make and eat a tortilla, and Blue Flashes, a visual novel.

“The medium is so woefully underexplored and it so desperately needs diverse voices to breathe life into its unexplored corners,” said Cauley. “As I travel, learn, collaborate and create, there are so many questions I want to explore: who makes games, why do they make games, what can be a game, what kinds of things can be made into a game. These are the questions that keep me up at night.”

Cauley was selected for the Watson Fellowship from among 149 finalists nominated by 40 leading liberal art colleges. This year’s 50th class of Watson Fellows hail from 17 states and eight countries and collectively will visit 67 countries as they pursue their projects.

More than 2,700 students have been awarded Watson Fellowships, providing opportunities to test their aspirations, abilities and perseverance through a personal project that is cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become international leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, MacArthur grant recipients, Pulitzer Prize winners, diplomats, artists, lawyers, doctors, faculty, journalists, and many renowned researchers and innovators.

The fellowship was established by the children of Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder of International Business Machines Corp., and his wife, Jeannette, to honor their parents’ long-standing interest in education and world affairs.

Historian Monica Rico honored by Outagamie County Historical Society

Monica Rico’s work as a public history practitioner has been recognized by the Outagamie County Historical Society.

Associate Professor of History at Lawrence University, Rico has been named the 2018 recipient of the historical society’s annual Lillian F. Mackesy Historian of the Year Award, which honors outstanding contributions to Outagamie County history.

She was cited for a pair of public presentations she made in 2017 on the history of environmentalism in the Fox Valley, one to the local community and one to the Northeast Wisconsin Land Trust. She also was recognized for her nearly decade-long service to the Outagamie County Historical Society.

“Beyond doing good history, Monica lead and nurtured the History Museum at the Castle through a time of critical change,” said Matt Carpenter, the History Museum’s executive director. “During her nine years of dedicated service to the board, including seven as board president, Monica made practical decisions and orchestrated consensus that lead to greater financial stability, more meaningful community engagement as well as creative and daring interpretive offerings.”

During Rico’s tenure as board president, the History Museum received numerous state and national awards, including being named one of 15 finalists earlier this month for the National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the country’s most prestigious museum award. National Medal winners will be announced later this spring with representatives from winning institutions honored May 24 at ceremony in Washington, D.C.

Established in 1976 by the Outagamie County Historical Society, the award is named in honor of Lillian Mackesy, a former columnist and editor for The Post Crescent, whose columns included: “Looking Back 100 Years,” “Historically Speaking” and “Remember When?”

Mackesy, the award’s first recipient, was devoted to the preservation and promotion of the region’s historical heritage. Her personal collection forms the core of the History Museum’s research files and photograph collection.

Rico joined the Lawrence faculty in 2001. Her scholarship interests include early America, the American West, gender and environment. The author of the book “Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth Century American West.” She was recognized in 2014 with Lawrence’s Award for Excellence in Creative Activity.

Rico is the third Lawrence faculty member in four years to be honored with the Mackesy Historian of the Year Award. Antoinette Powell, associate professor and music librarian, was recognized in 2015 and anthropologist Peter Peregrine was recognized in 2016.

Lawrence Academy of Music Girl Choir spring concert presents “Elements”

The Lawrence Academy of Music Girl Choir program explores “Elements” in its annual spring concerts Saturday, March 24. Two performances, featuring 300 singers in seven choirs representing grades 3-12, will be staged at 2 and 7 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel.

Tickets, at $12 for adults, $8 for students and seniors are available online at go.lawrence.edu/buytickets or at the Lawrence Box Office in the Music-Drama Center one hour before the show.

Group girl choir photo — Seven different choirs will perform as part of the Lawrence Academy of Music’s Girl Choir annual spring concerts.

The 90-minute program examines multiple elements — of music, of the natural world and of life.

“In constructing this concert, I encouraged our teachers to think beyond the words,” said Karen Bruno, director of the Academy of Music and conductor of the Bel Canto choir. “They guided their singers to consider questions such as: how did the composer use music to depict a particular element? What elements of music are most impactful in this particular piece? Do elemental emotions exist? If so, how do they manifest during a musical performance?”

Selections for “Elements” include two settings of the poem “Windy Nights” by Robert Louis Stevenson, Gustav Holst’s “Homeland,” a Filipino children’s song, the traditional Scottish farewell song “The Parting Glass,” and a song built on Sami (Norwegian) yoik that was used in the Disney movie “Frozen.”

Environmental justice advocate to receive honorary degree at 2018 commencement

One of the country’s leading environmental advocates and a pioneer in advancing environmental justice in urban communities will be recognized by Lawrence University with an honorary degree June 10 at its 169th commencement.

Peggy Shepard, executive director of the New York City-based organization WE ACT For Environmental Justice, will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and serve as the principal commencement speaker.

Since its founding in 1988, Shepard has nurtured and guided WE ACT from a grassroots organization of West Harlem volunteers into a professionally-staffed advocacy organization that works to ensure the rights to clean air, water and soil extends to people of all communities.

“I experienced Peggy’s passion for improving public health and her strong commitment to environmental justice for members of the Harlem community through an extended negotiation close to 15 years ago,” said Lawrence President Mark Burstein. “Her strong commitment to important human values and her willingness to negotiate and compromise to achieve her objectives serve as a wonderful example for our graduating class and for all of us in the Lawrence community. I look forward to welcoming her to Appleton this June. “

Shepard has been at the forefront of developing community-academic research partnerships to improve children’s environmental health. Through WE ACT, she has established cooperative partnerships with physicians and scientists at leading medical institutions, law schools, labor unions and diverse environmental, public health and urban constituencies.

A former journalist and a TEDx presenter, Shepard’s efforts to affect environmental protection and environmental health policy locally and nationally have been recognized with numerous honors.

She was the recipient of the Heinz Award for the Environment in 2002 in recognition of her “courageous advocacy and determined leadership in combating environmental injustice in urban America.” Named in honor of former U.S. Senator John Heinz, the Heinz awards celebrate recognize the extraordinary achievements of individuals in the areas of greatest importance to him.

In 2008, she was presented the Jane Jacobs Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rockefeller Foundation for her activism to build healthier communities by engaging residents in environmental and land-use decision.

The National Audubon Society in 2004 presented Shepard its Rachel Carson Award, which recognizes female environmental leaders and promotes women’s roles in the environmental movement.

Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health honored Shepard with its Dean’s Distinguished Service Award in 2004.

“Her strong commitment to important human values and her willingness to negotiate and compromise to achieve her objectives serve as a wonderful example for our graduating class and for all of us in the Lawrence community.
— Lawrence President Mark Burstein

Her passion for environmental health and justice extends beyond WE ACT. Shepard is a former chair of the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. She has worked with the National Institutes of Health, serving on its National Children’s Study Advisory Committee and its National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council.

A graduate of Howard University, Shepard has contributed her expertise to numerous non-profit boards, including the Environmental Defense Fund, New York League of Conservation Voters and the News Corporation Diversity Council, among others. She’s also served as a member of the New York City Mayor’s Sustainability Advisory Board and the New York City Waterfront Management Advisory Board.

Lawrence’s honorary degree will be Shepard’s second. She was previously recognized by Smith College in 2010.

A view from inside the campaign: Professor Timothy Troy offers up-close look at Sierra Leone’s presidential election

Bonds between students and faculty members that last well beyond commencement and graduation congratulations have long been a hallmark of a Lawrence University education.

One such example recently played out in Sierra Leone, where theatre arts professor Timothy X. Troy reunited with former student Momodu Maligi for two weeks on the campaign trail of the country’s upcoming national presidential election.

Professor Tim Troy and Momodu Magligi — Timothy Troy, Hurvis Professor of Theatre Arts, spent two weeks in Sierra Leone on the presidential campaign trail with his former student and 2004 Lawrence graduate Momodu Maligi.

Troy traveled to the west African nation at the invitation of Maligi, a Sierra Leonean native who graduated from Lawrence in 2004. He returned to his homeland, where he now serves as the country’s Minister of Water Resources. He serves in the cabinet for the All People’s Congress (APC) party currently in power.

“I went purposefully to accompany Momodu during campaign activities leading up to the (March 7) election,” said Troy, Hurvis Professor of Theatre and Drama at Lawrence. “I was able to be with him for a variety of campaign activities as well as some of his ministerial activities.”

Taking a step outside of his normal role, Troy created a podcast reflecting on his first-hand experiences in Sierra Leone on the eve of the country’s historic presidential election.

Troy hopes listeners of his podcast come away with a clear view of his world into Maligi’s world.

“I want them to know why it’s important and to know that the stakes are high,” Troy explained. “Although I don’t get at it directly, if you listen carefully, you’ll see that there is civil discord underneath the surface. There is the possibility for violence and the hope that this next transition can happen peacefully is dearly felt by everyone I talked to.

Momodu Magligi sitting in his office — Momodu Maligi ’04 currently holds the cabinet post of Minister of Water Resources in the Sierra Leonean government.

“They all want their guy to win, but ultimately the specter of the civil war is still in living memory. Momodu was at Lawrence because of the Civil War. We’re honored that he’s bringing the perspectives of the kind of education we offer to his work there. Not everyone there shares that kind of perspective. It’s a country that’s rebuilding. It’s not stable. What they’re hoping for is stability. That’s certainly Momodou’s point of view. His candidate (Samura Kamara) is the continuity candidate. We’ll see if that point of view, that hope, prevails.”

While it might seem strange that a government major who took one class — voice and diction — with a theatre professor would develop such a bond, Troy says “that’s part of the beauty of this thing.”

“I never lost track of Momodu and our relationship has continued since he was a student,” said Troy, who traveled to Sierra Leone in December 2016 with Lawrence students to lead a series of Shakespeare workshops at various schools. “I have so much respect for Momodu’s efforts in helping rebuild his country and he feels so warmly about his Lawrence experience that my presence there was just a continuation of that ongoing relationship.”

Momodu Magligi giving a speech on a campaign stop — On the presidential campaign trail, Momodu Maligi engages with members of the All People’s Congress party during a stop in Bo District.

In traveling with Maligi on the campaign trail, Troy says he could see the lessons Maligi learned from having lived in America for a time. There are core values about fair governance and the public good he brought back to his homeland.

“Momodu learned what it’s like to have good social services, what it means to have clean running water in every household. He experienced that firsthand and it’s very clear that’s the goal. I was able to witness, through him and his ministerial and party colleagues, the fact they have a clear vision of where they would like to go. The water main that brings water into my house was laid 100 years ago. That kind of infrastructure is still waiting to be built in Sierra Leone. It’s a big task, but it’s clear goal for someone like Momodu and his colleagues.”

“I have so much respect for Momodu’s efforts in helping rebuild his country and he feels so warmly about his Lawrence experience that my presence there was just a continuation of that ongoing relationship.”
— Professor Timothy X. Troy

The major issues in the presidential campaign, according to Troy, are tied to the history of the Sierra Leone Civil War that lasted nearly 11 years (1991-2002), the Ebola crisis in 2014 and the attempts of a poor nation trying to establish a middle class.

“That’s really the national agenda,” says Troy, who spent four days at West Point prior to leaving for Sierra Leone, visiting with members of the academy’s geography department and talking to Africa-area experts there. “They haven’t had a stable raise of a middle class through the 20th century, so they have a very different starting point.”

A billboard for Sierra Leone presidential candiddate Samura Kamara — A billboard at Lumley Beach in the capital city of Freetown promotes the presidential candidacy of All People’s Congress party candidate Sumara Kamara.

As the country’s current foreign minister and someone who has served under three very different regimes, Kamara is seen as many as the favorite to win the election. But Troy calls the outcome “a huge unknown.”

“That’s one of the compelling things here. We look at Kamara and think ‘okay, in so far is how Sierra Leone stands in the world internationally, he is the best candidate. It’s so clear,’” said Troy, who met Kamara several times during his trip.

“But no one really knows,” Troy added. “There is no reliable international polling. There’s no credible equivalent of the BBC or of NPR that is recognized as a neutral observer that can help sort the various points of view. This is such a poor country you couldn’t even establish a credible telephone polling sample. Literally nobody knows who will win.”

Lawrence’s connections to Sierra Leone and Momodu Maligi include a visit he made to campus last spring to deliver a talk for the Povolny Lecture Series.

Government professor Claudena Skran has been extensively engaged with Sierra Leone for more than a decade. After spending time there conducting research on the role of NGOs in refugee resettlement, she founded KidsGive, a Lawrence-based nonprofit organization that provides scholarships for students in Sierra Leone and works to educate U.S. students about Sierra Leonean life and culture.

Neuroscientist Julie Brefczynski-Lewis ’97 discusses new brain scanning technology in science colloquium

Emerging technology for conducting brain scans with potential for a variety of applications will be discussed in a Lawrence University Science Hall Colloquium.

Julie Brefczynski-Lewis wearing PET scanner on her head — Julie Brefczynski-Lewis ’97

Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, assistant professor of neuroscience at West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, presents “Walking with a Brain Scanner: A Novel Wearable PET Scanner,” Monday, March 5 at 4:30 p.m. in Thomas Steitz Hall of Science 102. The event is free and open to the public.

Until now, research on the brain has been limited to testing subjects who need to be perfectly still in an MRI scanner or who can move but only have the surface of the brain imaged through an EEG, leaving many human behaviors unstudied or understudied.

Brefczynski-Lewis, a 1997 Lawrence graduate, is working on a prototype of a new neuroimaging tool that images the entire brain during motion. Incorporating a small and highly sensitive type of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) detector, the imager moves with the head, so the subjects can be upright and perform tasks that involve movement, including walking.

The wearable PET has potential applications for stroke recovery, social cognition and virtual reality environments.

Brefczynski-Lewis primary research focus is on testing how compassion meditation training can help relieve stress, especially the stress of difficult interpersonal relations.

After graduating from Lawrence with a major in biology and having completed an interdisciplinary area in neuroscience, Brefczynski-Lewis earned a Ph.D. in cell biology, neurobiology and anatomy at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Anne Jacobson Schutte 1940-2018: Early modern European history scholar, respected student mentor

Former history professor Anne Jacobson Schutte, who spent 23 years on the Lawrence University faculty, died Monday, Feb. 26 in Chicago following a cerebral hemorrhage two days earlier. She was 77.

Anne had been living in Venice, Italy in retirement before returning to Chicago in the summer of 2016.

With research interests in 15th- and 16th-century Italy, especially the Renaissance and the Reformation, Anne joined the Lawrence faculty as an instructor in 1966. She spent two years as a Scholar-in-Residence at Chicago’s Newberry Library (1969-71) before returning to the history department that fall as an assistant professor. She was promoted to full professor in 1985 and taught here six more years before joining the faculty at the University of Virginia in 1992. She spent 14 years at UVA, retiring in May, 2006.

During her time at Lawrence, Anne was known as an outstanding mentor and advocate for students, many of whom credit her as the reason they went on to graduate school. A bit of a trailblazer as one of the few female professors on the faculty at that time, she was an exacting teacher who set high standards for her students. A lover of all things Italian, she possessed a sly and witty sense of humor and was widely respected by colleagues in her field.

Born in Palo Alto, Calif., she earned a bachelor’s degree in history and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Brown University’s Pembroke College. She returned to her hometown to earn a master’s degree in history and a Ph.D. in history and humanities at Stanford University.

The recipient of Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Anne also held several administrative positions during her career, among them president of the Society of Fellows and director of the Distinguished Majors Program at UVA. While at Lawrence she served a term as director of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest’s Florence Program.

Anne was the author of nearly 80 scholarly articles and five books, including “Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer,” which was honored by the “Society for Italian Historical Studies” with its Howard R. Marraro Prize. She was working on a sixth book, “Printed Italian Biographies of Holy People, 1634-1798,” at the time of her death.

She was honored in 2012 by the Society for Reformation Research with its Bodo Nischan Award for scholarship, service and civility.

In accordance with her wishes, Anne’s remains will be cremated and her ashes scattered at locations in the United States and abroad that she particularly loved. She is survived by a brother, Jake Jacobson, of Seattle.

About Lawrence University
Founded in 1847, Lawrence University uniquely integrates a college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, both devoted exclusively to undergraduate education. It was selected for inclusion in the book “Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College.” Engaged learning, the development of multiple interests and community outreach are central to the Lawrence experience. Lawrence draws its 1,500 students from nearly every state and more than 50 countries.

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