Richard J. Alley

The Sciences at Rhodes – Past, Present and Future

Fall 2012

The Biologists

A profile of former biology majors, current students and department head

(For the full texts, please click this link)

Gary Lindquester
Chair, Rhodes Department of Biology

Rhodes students today are constantly challenged, and they constantly rise to that challenge. This, says Gary Lindquester, Biology Department chair, is one of the reasons that teaching at Rhodes is so rewarding.

“It happens in the classroom with rigorous course material and complex ideas, it’s in the teaching laboratory where we develop exercises that train them in the scientific method and in various techniques … and it carries over into the research laboratories for students who work there,” he says. “The students are highly competent, they are interested and they have a good work ethic.”

Anahita Rahimi-Saber ’13

Anahita Rahimi-Saber was born and raised in Denmark and moved with her family to the United States, and Memphis, in 2000. She attended Lausanne Collegiate School and considered other colleges when the time came to make that important decision.

“I thought I wanted to study outside of Memphis, that I knew it too well and had outgrown it by the age of 18,” she says. “But when it came down to what I wanted to study, and finances and everything, Rhodes just made the most sense. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. I realized how important it is to have a family close by, and when I moved to campus it was kind of eye-opening and refreshing to learn how great Memphis really is and how much it has to offer.”

Veronica Lawson Gunn ’91, M.D.
Vice President of Population Health Management,
Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin

“I felt smarter when I stepped on campus,” Veronica Gunn says as she reminisces about her first visit to Rhodes. Though laughing, she insists there is some truth to that. “My visit at Rhodes was what undoubtedly convinced me that that is where I needed to go, and not to any other place.”

Not only did the aesthetics of the campus and the academic curriculum draw her in, but the professors—including Alan and Carolyn Jaslow in Biology, with whom she remains friends—“are examples of the faculty’s commitment to students, their full development and their full potential.”

Brian Wamhoff ’96
Vice President of Research & Development,
Co-Founder, HemoShear, LLC
Associate Professor of Medicine & Biomedical Engineering,
University of Virginia

Brian Wamhoff points to the atmosphere, the opportunity to play soccer and chiefly to members of the faculty such as Jay Blundon and Dee Birnbaum when asked what led to his interest in Rhodes College. It was these professors’ respective departments—Biology and Business—that would build the foundation for his life’s work.

Having attended the University of Missouri-Columbia for graduate school before the University of Virginia for his fellowship, Wamhoff recently took a path of entrepreneurship and biotech, while balancing life as an academic professor.

 

The Physicists

A profile of former physics majors, current students and department head

(For the full texts, please click this link)

Lars Monia ’15

After only one year at Rhodes, Lars Monia was given the keys to the moonbuggy, so to speak. The Great Moonbuggy Race is a NASA project for high school and college students who build simulated lunar rovers. It’s a challenge, says NASA, “to inspire them in Engineering and explore Engineering opportunities and possibilities.”

Monia was asked to recruit other students, put together a team to manage, and was given a prospective budget by Physics chair Brent Hoffmeister.

“Hosting a team for the first time was pretty challenging,” says Monia. “I had to teach everyone how to do the engineering programs and how the design process works and what the project even was—what in the world is a moonbuggy?”

Charles Robertson Jr. ’65

For Charles Robertson, a Rhodes education began not when he walked on campus for the first time as a freshman, but when his parents did as students. Thanks to Charles William Robertson Sr. ’29 and Lola Ellis Robertson ’33 being scientists themselves, Charles Jr. may have been looking at a preordained career.

“I had some interest in Engineering, but by the end of my senior year in high school I was pretty much hooked on Physics,” Robertson says. “My father, though a biologist, had a significant interest in the physical sciences and encouraged my interest in Physics.”

Harry Swinney ’61
Sid Richardson Foundation Regents Chair
The University of Texas at Austin

Harry Swinney heard about Rhodes College—then Southwestern—from several people, including the family doctor, James Gladney ’38, in his Presbyterian church in Homer, LA.

“I asked my parents if I could visit Southwestern and they drove me there for a two-day visit in the spring of 1955,” Swinney recalls.

He never considered any other option and enrolled with plans to obtain two bachelor’s degrees in five years in the 3-2 plan, with three years at Rhodes followed by two at Georgia Tech. In his freshman year, however, he took a Physics class from professor Jack Taylor ’44 and “became excited about the subject.” It was a class that would turn his plans, and life, around. In honor of Taylor, Swinney in 2000 established the Jack H. Taylor Scholarship at Rhodes for students majoring in the physical and biological sciences.

Brent Hoffmeister
Chair, Department of Physics

Research teams in Geneva, Switzerland, recently provided proof of the elusive Higgs Boson particle, making the kind of news that gets physicists, and future physicists, excited. Closer to home, Rhodes Physics professor and department chair Brent Hoffmeister is excited about newer courses being offered, including Nuclear Physics, Engineering Physics, Medical Physics, and Fluid Dynamics. This semester, a course on Accelerator Physics, the sort of science that gave the world the Higgs Boson, is being offered for the first time.

Passing along his passion for the sciences is paramount in Hoffmeister’s teaching. “Personally, I like how teaching and scientific research have fused together to become the same sort of thing for me at Rhodes,” he says. “I really enjoy involving students in my research, and I think it is an important experience for the students too. A great way to learn about science is to function as a scientist.”

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

Oct. 4, 2012

Diversity is at the center of Playback Memphis, a professional ensemble made up of a dozen actors and musicians. Their focus: to offer healing through drama, and in the process, tell the story of what it means to be a Memphian through the experiences of its citizens.The mission of Playback Memphis is to “transform this ethos of Memphis that has been one of anguish and brokenness to one of connectedness,” says the company’s founder and director, Virginia Murphy. “Our work is about love and forgiveness.”

A Playback production is a collaboration between performer and audience in which an audience member is invited to tell the story of a moment from his or her life and then watches as the actors improvise that moment, “listening for really what is the essence of what this person is saying — what is the heart of their story,” Murphy said. “Their (the actors’) job is to communicate the feelings and the thoughts of the teller, and those layers of feeling, because so often in life we don’t have just singular feelings. They do that through movement and music; we use a lot of metaphor, and it’s just very symbolic, embodied expression.”The troupe puts on a regular series of shows titled “Memphis Matters” at Theatre South in First Congregational Church in the Cooper-Young area. The series was born of the idea that Memphis “is an intense place to live, no matter who you are,” Murphy said, “and there are aspects of life here that make it uniquely rich and wonderful, and aspects that make it really complex and challenging.”

Performances aren’t all about civic pride, though they do speak to the heart and soul of the citizenry no matter its level of income or social stratum. Robert Neimeyer, a longtime professor of clinical psychotherapy with the University of Memphis, has worked closely with Playback. He and Murphy are collaborating on a chapter of a book on grief and the expressive arts … (read more)

Health & Fitness story for The Commercial Appeal

July 16, 2012

Ken Hall took his mother to the hospital last year for complications from congestive heart failure and kidney issues on the same day. While there, she was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease his father had already been diagnosed with. “It occurred to me that my dad’s taking insulin shots twice a day, now she’s going to have to start, I’m next,” Hall said. “It’s like a time bomb.”

As a proactive measure at the beginning of the year, Hall, director of communications for Leadership Memphis, set out to lose 20 pounds by his 50th birthday in February. His mission was accomplished by cutting out his almost daily fast-food drive-through habit and saying “no” to the Hostess cupcakes. As far as any previous exercise routine, Hall said, he “really tried to avoid it.” But with his new lifestyle came new habits, and working out on the elliptical machine for a half-hour every day was one.

“It was pretty darn easy,” he said of entering this regimen and his subsequent weight loss.

For 40-year-old Heather Griffin, the hardest part of her lifestyle change was cutting out sweets. “I’m a cupcake freak,” she laughs, “so in giving that up, that was more painful than running a half-marathon, actually.” … (read more)

Health & Fitness feature story for The Commercial Appeal

April 9, 2012

Leanna Tedford was athletic growing up in Clarksdale, Miss., where she played four sports in high school. In college, however, those active ways were pushed to the side and the weight gain that goes along with more sedentary days became inevitable and, seemingly, a way of life.

But then she began talking with personal trainer Clark Butcher.

Butcher, owner of Propel Endurance Training and co-owner of Victory Bicycle Studio, has been a competitive cyclist since he was 16. He’s been coaching for a dozen years, having gone into the business while a student at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., at age 18 when he was finally eligible for liability insurance.

The Cordova High School graduate has raced competitively in the United States, Canada and Europe, and is a certified USA Cycling coach (USA Cycling is the governing body of all cycling events in the country).

Butcher worked with Tedford to develop an exercise and diet program that would benefit her overall health while not being too obtrusive to the late-night lifestyle of the popular Memphis bartender for Jim’s Place East. He noted that “the idea came about over beers and fries at the Hi-Tone.” … (read more)

Feature story in Emphasis on Healthcare issue for The Memphis Daily News

March 5, 2012

In February, senior research assistant Richard Cushing began working with the Pathology Department of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in the Tissue Services Core and Repository.

The repository is a warehouse of more than 3 million pieces of human tissue from hearts, lungs, kidneys and livers, as well as biopsies of various types of tumors. The samples are available to doctors, researchers and students to conduct studies on and compare to those of a patient’s.

“I’m facilitating, not just one professor, but anyone who needs it, a wide variety of different tissue types and samples for them to do research with or cure people’s diseases,” said Cushing, who will prepare and stain slides, or core the tissue samples, to be sent to those who requested it … (read more)

Health & Biotech story for The Memphis Daily News

Nov. 14, 2011

In a nondescript building on Jefferson Avenue, in what looks like an oversized kitchen with multiple refrigerators, Divyen Patel and his staff are searching genetic codes to find the switch that might, one day, turn off cancer.

At Genome Explorations, the business he began in 2001, Patel explains best what the scientists and lab techs do.

“We actually break down genetic disease on a genetic basis, and then try to understand what the causative agents are for any particular disease.”

Patel began work with technology he developed and brought to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, researching childhood cancers before expanding into adult cancers. The technology allows Genome Explorations to run 1.3 million to 3 million different tests on a particular tissue. The results can then be used to compare normal to diseased tissue to figure out just what went wrong genetically for that disease to occur … (read more)

Medical feature story for The Memphis Daily News

Aug. 3, 2011

Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. is on the cutting edge of cancer treatment, especially where that treatment may not involve any cutting at all.

The radiation oncology department at Baptist is in the final stages of installing the nonsurgical CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery System to increase the effectiveness of treatment and decrease the time needed for tumor radiation. The new technology and hardware, costing more than $5 million including construction, is expected to be up and running by September.

CyberKnife is the newest weapon in the fight against cancer, and it’s the first of its kind in Memphis and the surrounding area, delivering high doses of radiation with sub-millimeter accuracy.

It is a massive piece of equipment at more than eight feet tall, yet moves with the nimbleness and agility of a surgeon. The sleek, white body is adapted from the robots used to build cars, and the technology is seen in commercials and film. Those machines, however, are incredibly fast while the CyberKnife has been scaled back to move at only 3 percent of its possible speed. The administration of radiation need not be rushed … (read more)

Hidden Memphis feature story for The Commercial Appeal

May 8, 2011

In 1935, America was still in the grip of the Great Depression. Thousands of men were out of work, and families shifted, hungry and anxious, looking for employment and a helping hand of any sort. Out of this panic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was created, a series of economic programs meant to provide relief, recovery and reform to our country.

Of the New Deal programs, the most aggressive by far was the Works Progress Administration, begun in 1935. The WPA employed millions and invested nearly $7 billion in carrying out public works projects across the land. Shelby County was a large beneficiary of the upgrades and pay with $20 million in assets by 1937 to show for the work.

The goals of the WPA in Memphis were to employ men and women and improve health, recreation and, by default, community. Projects overseen by WPA district supervisor M.E. Williams at the time included the installation of 5,500 feet of sanitary sewers and the resurfacing of alleyways. Crump Stadium was built to hold 15,000 at a cost of $161,270, Union Avenue was paved, many area public schools were painted and repaired, and a dog pound was built at Front and Auction.

In Overton Park, an open-air band stage and shell were built for $17,609, while in the nearby zoo, a monkey island was constructed at a cost of $14,573.

As to health, for a city still reeling from the effects and memories of the yellow fever epidemic, the fight against mosquitoes and malaria was paramount, and money and manpower were spent to shore up ditches, culverts and bayous around the area, and a new hospital was built … (read more)

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

Dec. 30, 2010

Thomas “Tad” Daniel said his wife, Jill, used to talk a lot about organ donation. In fact, the ICU nurse for Baptist Memorial Hospital was adamant that, should anything happen to her, her organs and tissue should be donated in order to help others live.

“Usually it was on Friday nights when we’d get our night alone together, and if the weather was right, we’d sit on the back porch and listen to our music, and she brought it up several times,” Tad Daniel said. “It wasn’t even a decision for me; she made me promise her that I’d make sure her organs were donated.”

Those wishes were carried out in September 2009 when 50-year-old Jill Daniel suffered several irreversible cerebral hemorrhages, leaving behind her husband and three children. In the end, the men and women with whom she worked so closely were charged with her care.

“It hits close to home, and it was very touching and very touchy, because it let us know that life is very precious and you never know when the Lord is going to call you,” said Kim Gilley, an organ recovery coordinator for Mid-South Transplant Foundation, who worked with Jill over the years … (read more)

Lifestyle feature for The Commercial Appeal

Nov. 21, 2010

Brad Bradshaw “died” three times and can recall one of them.

On the day he was discharged from the hospital after his heart transplant, something went wrong with fluid build-up in his chest, and he was “going downhill quickly,” he recalls. Typically, there would have been a nurse by his side 24 hours a day, but for whatever reason, there wasn’t one nearby this time. There was, however, a physician with the surgical team standing just outside his room.

“They ran in, sliced me open and brought me back,” Bradshaw, 58, said. “That was quite an experience.”

Despite downplaying this instant of his life, Bradshaw still refers to his heart transplant four years ago at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis as “a miracle.”

The heart and lung transplant program at Baptist Memorial Hospital has seen 287 heart and 87 lung transplants since its inception in 1985. Celebrating its 25th year this year, it is the only such heart transplant program in the city and the only lung program in West Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi … (read more)