Colgate Magazine Spring 2024

Want bugs with that? Chef Joseph Yoon (left), the selfproclaimed edible insect ambassador and founder of Brooklyn Bugs, visited Colgate in November. Yoon prepped entomological delicacies like guacamole dusted with crispy, crushed black ants as well as brownies flavored with mealworm powder. He also gave a presentation at an ENST Brown Bag Lunch where he discussed the potential of not only edible insects, but also the burgeoning industry of insect agriculture to create resilient solutions for our global food systems.

— Jasmine Kellogg

Read this issue and all previous issues at colgate.edu/magazine. look

Whole-Person Healing Anti-inflammatory diets, acupuncture, Reiki, and more: Learn about complementary medicine from alumni practitioners.

JoAnn Inserra ’82 Duncan

Endeavor

The Psychology of Kids’ TV

Ditch the Clutter

Making Waves

Vice President for University Communications

Daniel DeVries

Director of University Publications

Aleta Mayne

Assistant Editor

Rebecca Docter

Associate Vice President for University Communications

Mark Walden

Senior Art Director

Karen Luciani

University Photographer

Mark DiOrio

Communications Specialist

Kathy Jipson

Contributors: Omar Ricardo Aquije, athletics communications manager; Kelli Ariel, web manager; Mary Donofrio, advancement communications dir.; Jordan Doroshenko, dir., athletic communications; Bernie Freytag, art dir.; Garrett Mutz, sr. designer; Brian Ness, sr. multimedia producer; Kristin Putman, sr. social media strategist; Amber Springer, web content specialist

physical or mental disability, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, predisposing genetic characteristics, domestic violence victim status, or any other protected category under applicable local, state, or federal law. For inquiries regarding the University’s non-discrimination policies, contact Renee Madison,

Building Colgate

Every now and then, in a college or university’s history, you can actually see significant changes. This is one of those times at Colgate. It’s a rare moment at any college and university when the physical campus clearly enters a new chapter.

But, both by plan, and also due to some serendipity, the physical expression of Colgate’s third century is becoming more apparent on the campus.

The 19th century at Colgate is most visible in the line of buildings from Alumni Hall to East Hall. The 20th century has two visible chapters. First is the completion of the quads up on the hill with the construction of the chapel and the major academic buildings to the west, as well as the completion of the residential quad. The second half of the 20th century can be seen in the rise of the modern buildings, from Reid to Dana to the original Case Library. Student life at Colgate has changed in fits and starts with the residence halls up on the hill developing first, and Broad Street developing and changing over many decades. The addition of several hundred beds in apartments and townhouses started in the 1970s and continued into the early 21st century.

Right now on the campus, the Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Center (and the related renovation of Colgate’s

1827 West Hall, 1834 East Hall, 1862 Alumni Hall

1900

1906 Lathrop Hall, 1918 Memorial Chapel, 1926 Lawrence Hall, 1930 McGregory Hall

1959 Reid Athletic Center, 1959 Case Library, 1965 Dana Arts Center

2000

1966 113 Broad, 1995 Curtis and Drake halls

2005 The Townhouses

2019 Pinchin and Burke halls

2024

What is this period now? I think of it as a period in which Colgate embraces its national role and recognizes that it has a campus that includes not simply the upper quadrangles but also a large region along Broad Street.

2024 Olin Hall renovation

2024 Bernstein Hall

2025 Peter’s Glen

2026 18–22 Utica St.

largest academic building, Olin Hall) is nearing completion. Down the hill, the new building to house our Department of Computer Science as well as numerous arts departments and programs is fully formed next to Whitnall Field. Slated for completion this summer, faculty, staff, and students will utilize the building in the fall semester for classes and creative endeavors facilitated by the building’s fabrication labs, a robotics lab, a digital recording studio, five computer labs, an experimental exhibition and performance space, a media archaeology lab, and flexible classrooms. (For more, see p. 24.)

Clearing for the glen that will connect what are now two distinct “academic neighborhoods” has begun, and Peter’s Glen will soon be a several-acre green zone for Colgate. A new mixed-use apartment building downtown in the village has begun. In the months ahead, we will begin the Lower Campus Initiative, which will see Colgate renovate the existing structures on Broad Street while adding new beds in a new row of structures in a line to the west of the existing buildings. We hope soon to announce plans for a full renewal of our athletics facilities and athletics campus.

I’m an historian by training, and it is tempting to name periods, to define them by a title. The 19th-century building program was surely The Period of the College on the Hill. With the emergence of McGregory, Lawrence, and Lathrop halls, we can see The Academic Program Emerges. The last period of significant growth — when in post–World War II Colgate we see the new Case Library, Reid Athletic Center, Dana Arts Center, and Olin Hall — is Colgate and the American Century, when a booming national economy is reflected in a booming campus.

What is this period now? I think of it as a period in which Colgate embraces its national role and recognizes that it has a campus that includes not simply the upper quadrangles but also a large region along Broad Street.

Colgate is truly a national, exceptional university of quite significant reach and reputation. Its emerging campus expresses that in stone. We are, in short, in an exciting time.

— Brian W. Casey

A Season of Change

Welcome to the health-themed edition of Colgate Magazine

You’re hopefully celebrating spring — a season of renewal — with the mental boost that accompanies better weather. Perhaps you’re evaluating your physical wellness, assessing your living space, or enjoying the dopamine rush of planning a summer vacation.

With this special issue, it’s our intention to provide compelling pieces that are both informational and express the beauty of humanity.

Colgate’s database of alumni includes approximately 2,500 graduates (whom we know of) working in a health care–related field. In these pages, you’ll read about an alumna finishing her residency with Native peoples in rural Alaska, as well as a cardiothoracic surgeon who helped save David Letterman’s life and performs more mini-aortic valve surgeries than anyone else in New England. We talked to graduates who deliver babies and those who hold the hands of the dying.

In addition, we learned from alumni who specialize in mental wellness and complementary medicine. The radiance illustrated by our cover art reminds me of advice offered by JoAnn Inserra ’82 Duncan, who is a Reiki master teacher: “Think of the positive energy that’s out there in the universe.” Many of the alumni we interviewed spoke from the heart about how their work enables them to help others in life-changing ways.

We stretched our theme to explore financial well-being, spirituality, the health of the planet, and, yes, how to organize your home.

Closer to our home, we met with Colgate counselors who are teaming up with athletics to support student-athletes’ mental wellness, as well as sustainability staff members working with our landscape project manager to preserve the campus.

This season of change is a good time to announce a forthcoming modification in Colgate Magazine’s frequency. After the summer issue, we will be combining the autumn issue with the winter issue; and mailing with the autumn/winter issue will be the President’s Report. We surveyed alumni to hear their thoughts on these publications, and we learned that the majority of our readers still prefer to read the magazine in print. Due to rising costs, we need to change our publishing frequency to three times a year, but we are dedicated to providing the same high-quality print publication our readers expect.

Share your thoughts on this health edition by writing to us at magazine@colgate.edu. In the meantime, we wish you all the best for your well-being.

— Aleta Mayne, director of University publications

We Asked, You Answered

In February, we sent a survey to alumni to gauge readership engagement with Colgate Magazine and the President’s Report

Here’s what we learned from the 1,261 respondents

Gender: 69% men, 30% women

Race/ethnicity: 89% white, 2% Black/African American, 2% Asian, 1% Hispanic/Latinx, 1% other, 5% prefer not to say

Age: 50% 65 and over, 29% 50–64, 14% 35–49, 5% 25–34, 2% under 25

Magazine Engagement

Readership: 68% read every issue, 20% read most issues, 10% read occasional issues, 1% never read an issue

Issue engagement: 16% read all of the issue, 46% read most of the issue, 38% read some of the issue

Print vs. digital: 69% read the magazine exclusively in print; 25% read it mostly in print, occasionally online

Favorite articles: 53% favor alumni activities, 39% favor campus life, 8% favor faculty activities

President’s Report

80% of respondents read the President’s Report

Of those respondents, 31% read all of the report, 34% read most of it, 30% read some. Topics respondents found the most interesting, in order of popularity: Third-Century Plan updates, admissions, the financial report, and academic and faculty endeavors.

One reader wrote: I LOVE the Colgate Magazine. The large format allows for luxurious type and photo displays. Generous white space gives the eye and mind elbow room/breathing room for taking in the content. One wants to amble through an article, not race through it. I love learning

about the interesting things that people are involved in. Each story illustrates the value that a liberal arts foundation provides for creative thought and action. I like the combination of big, meaty articles and little tidbits. I admire the excellent paper you use. The landscape photos are so well done. The colors and tone of the cover of the President’s Report make it breathtaking — the rich, saturated gray of the slate dormers and the misty pastel of late afternoon make me stare and stare at them. So for me, reading the magazine is an intellectual and aesthetic pleasure.

Keep up the good work! I am happy for the sound management and ethical grounding of Colgate.

Meg LeSchack MA’68

Letters

Core Comments

The winter 2024 issue introduced the revised Core Curriculum that the University implemented in the fall 2023 semester. Readers commented on the revised Core and remembered their own experiences.

I am age 95 and was in the first class that experienced the new Core Curriculum in 1946 through 1950. It was a broadening experience, especially the freshman course titled Philosophy and Religion, taught by Quaker professor Ken Morgan, the Colgate chaplain. This was a novel appointment since Colgate has Baptist roots. Quite a one-year course that challenged all our beliefs and laid the groundwork for our futures.

david n. kluge ’50

I was particularly interested in the piece on revamping Colgate’s Core Curriculum. As I reminisce on my days at Colgate and anticipate attending my 50th Reunion, I thought back to the Core Curriculum when I was at Colgate 1970–74. In retrospect there was only one Core course that I remember and had a longterm impact on my life and my career. That was Philosophy, Religion & Drama taught by Professor Jerry Balmuth. Professor Balmuth was not an easy grader, and errors in spelling, grammar, and

punctuation were always marked down. In retrospect, the two critical life lessons I took away from his class were the ability to write cogently and the ability to condense a large amount of information into a short critical analysis of the subject material. This has served me incredibly well in my career. The skills I learned in Professor Balmuth’s class are still completely relevant 50-plus years later. A successful career in just about any field chosen will be based, in large part, on the individual’s ability to think, critically assess, and effectively communicate. I continue to believe in the usefulness of the liberal arts education and hope that Colgate never loses sight of the lessons we learned in Professor Balmuth’s class. The University will serve its students well by continuing to require them to learn how to think, critically assess, and communicate in written form. I expect this is a significant part of the reason that a large percentage of Colgate graduates become very successful in life after graduation.

Bob Chamberlain ’74

The topic of the Core Curriculum has long been important to me. I have remained delighted that Colgate has continued in its Core approach to education. Colgate has withstood and prospered against the aggressive opposition to the importance and benefits of a liberal arts education. I welcome and support that commitment. The Core Curriculum is fundamental to the Colgate experience. I graduated from Colgate in 1963. I did well academically and went on to receive my degree in law from Harvard Law School. I was also one of the first nine participants in the initial

London Economics Study group. I took most of my Core courses in my freshman year. I did not then know my areas of interest, and the Core courses were both a way to avoid decisionmaking, while also participating in legitimate courses. Core 11 Philosophy and Religion, taught by Jerome Balmuth, was an incredible experience. My art course was thoroughly enjoyable and quite broadening. My writing course, Core 22, had an especially important impact on me in that the professor commented positively on my approach to writing. Those words resonated with me, particularly since they contrasted with some of the less favorable reactions my high school English teachers conveyed. Core 22 made me feel good about myself. Then, as an attorney, I went on to use the written word in ways fundamental to my career and my legal and nonlegal undertakings.

In reading the Colgate Magazine story, I found myself being very supportive of the course selections and my sense of their content. I am intrigued by the regular 10-year review. I think a review of those reviews would be intellectually worthwhile. Since my years, six reviews and changes would have been implemented. Most likely those 10-year analyses reflect social and academic trends. Some reflect significance, others the more ephemeral. Both could become learning vehicles. They also become a test of the historic longevity of the Core commitments, commitments that should have impacts long beyond their years experienced by individual Colgate students. I recommend that such an inquiry be conducted. It could well prove instructive and reassuring. In essence, one more proof of the value of the Core Curriculum.

Don Bergmann ’63

For decades, the Core Curriculum has been a distinctive feature of Colgate’s educational program. In addition to the usual freshman composition course (Core 15), my class took six or seven Core courses, spread out over our first

three years, with all students in the class taking the same courses at the same time. Prospective science majors were exempt from the two-semester Core 11–12 sequence in physical and biological science; we took the one-semester Core 10 on the history and philosophy of science instead. As a result, we were all studying and discussing the same texts at the same time: the Book of Job and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Core 17, Janson’s History of Art in Core 21, Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, and Galbraith’s The New Industrial State in Core 37. In Core 38, we had a choice of courses on such “emerging” countries as China, India, or Kenya; but even there, a student who was reading Red Star Over China could have a discussion with his roommate, who might be reading Facing Mount Kenya. When the whole student body met in the chapel to consider its response to the 1970 killings at Kent State, the discussion was laced with references to Kant’s categorical imperative: Everyone present knew what that was because all four classes had read Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in Core 18.

With the new Core, introduced in 2023, that has mostly disappeared. As far as I can tell, students in the Class of 2027 will have only one course in common — the Conversations course. The rest is, essentially, a garden-variety distribution requirement: one course each in literature, math, natural science,

The skills I learned in Professor Balmuth’s class are still completely relevant 50-plus years later.

Bob Chamberlain ’74

social science, etc. I am sure that these courses have been specifically designed or chosen to be interdisciplinary, or to connect to topics of societal concern. But there is no longer a core holding the entire class together and connecting it with adjacent classes. This is a great loss — to the University and to its students.

I understand that curricula must evolve and that students don’t like requirements. I am also painfully aware that, in these days of increasing specialization, it is difficult to get faculty to teach introductory courses even in their own fields — much less to step outside their comfort zones to teach something that is truly interdisciplinary. Then again, the University has an identity too, and that identity is expressed in its curriculum. Colgate should continue to honor a commitment to the kind of Core Curriculum that makes Colgate Colgate, and that distinguishes its students from those of other liberal arts colleges.

John F. Kihlstrom ’70, University of California–Berkeley, distinguished professor emeritus

The magazine invited Professor Christian DuComb, Core Revision Committee member, to respond to John Kihlstrom’s feedback: I am moved by Professor Kihlstrom’s vivid recollection of the Core courses he took as a member of the Class of 1970. There is no doubt that the new Core includes fewer common elements than the Core of 50 years ago, but the Core remains a fundamental, unifying, and intellectually rigorous aspect of a Colgate education. Professor Kihlstrom’s letter inspired me to review a copy of the 1960–70 Course catalog, in which I discovered a surprising continuity in the Core Curriculum over time. For example, the Core Sciences component in the new Core Curriculum addresses the history and philosophy of science, much

like Core 10; and the Core Communities component offers multidisciplinary courses on regions and nation states across the globe, much like Core 38.

It could be argued that today’s Core courses take a more topical approach than in the past, with fewer shared texts and more instructor discretion over course content and pedagogy. But Colgate today is a different institution than it was in 1970. Members of Professor Kihlstrom’s class could select from among 28 majors (or concentrations, as they were called then). Today, Colgate offers twice this number of majors, in disciplines such as Chinese, computer science, creative writing, and environmental studies — subjects that were barely taught at this institution 50 years ago, but that are essential to a 21stcentury liberal arts curriculum. Today’s students also have the option to double major, to declare a minor (or even two!), and to choose from a much wider array of off-campus study options. These changes reflect the needs of a student body that is 50% larger than in 1970 and significantly more diverse, especially given that Colgate did not begin to admit women until just after Professor Kihlstrom and his class celebrated their commencement. (The first female student matriculated at Colgate in the fall of 1970.) Although some members of the Colgate faculty lament the recent changes to the Core Curriculum, overall faculty participation in the Core is more robust than it has been in years. For me and many of my colleagues, the new Core has reinvigorated our enthusiasm for interdisciplinary teaching by providing a framework that balances flexibility and commonality, and that opens the Core to perspectives that have long been marginalized or excluded from academic discourse. The Core Curriculum has evolved with the institution and with society at large, but it reflects Colgate’s ongoing

commitment to a common intellectual enterprise, shared by faculty and students, as the foundation of a liberal arts education.

Christian DuComb, ColgatE’s associate dean of the faculty for faculty recruitment and development Weekend Reading

I decided to start 2024 with “Screenless Saturdays.” After barely resisting my 5-year-old’s entreaties — “Daddy! I am so bored! I need electronics!” — I sat down to enjoy the autumn 2023 issue while my daughters prepared plastic salads in their living room restaurant.

In particular I could empathize with Jean Gordon ’87 Kocienda’s “The Kindness of Strangers” (p. 10). I volunteered to teach ESL adults for a few years, and they are remarkable people. Many of my students rose before the sun, worked three low-paying jobs, and before returning home to dinner and their families, took my class with more energy and positivity than most people I know, including myself.

For those of you who don’t have young children and do have the time, I can’t recommend [Screenless Saturdays] more.

Jacob Sydney ’93

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

I enjoyed reading the winter 2024 article about Associate Professor Jeff Bary’s work concerning light pollution and its effects on humans (“The Bright Side of the Dark,” p. 15). How wonderful that Colgate is fostering research in this arena. Unmentioned in the article but

also of concern is the potential effect light pollution has on other animals and insects. This is another burden that humankind is placing upon a fragile ecosystem, and the question is not if it will cause problems, but how serious will those problems be for those organisms and for humankind.

Robert Rosen P’10,’17

On the Radio

I always look forward to receiving and reading the Colgate Magazine. I was especially pleased to find in the winter 2024 issue a photo of the general manager of WRCU radio on p. 39. I learned everything I possibly could about being on the radio at Colgate and have continued my love of broadcasting ever since. For many years, I was a talk show host in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Most recently, I cohost two medical-related shows in San Antonio, Texas. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think fondly of my days “spinning the wax” at WRCU.

Ron Aaron Eisenberg ’64

IVoices

Chasing Fire

n early August 2021 we are in western Idaho chasing lightning bolts that always beat us to the ground. The forest is dry, with red needle cast and sagebrush covering the ground and ponderosa pines dotting the foothills. The hills and canyons are sharp in places and rolling in others, but together the mountains serve as a massive catcher’s mitt for lightning. Lightning that drives up steadily on the backs of giant clouds from the never-ending desert. The desert that stretches from the Gulf to us. The storms are patterned, predictable — that’s why we’re here. Why we lie up at night, sleeping on the ground at a remote ranger station with something like hand-crank Wi-Fi, only powerful enough to check the radar on our phones to see if lightning will start a fire to keep us busy the next day. The duality of wildland firefighting, someone says. You’re either getting your butt kicked or kicking it. I can’t sleep. I turn sideways, so I have a view downcanyon and out over the whole expanse of high desert, and see distant flashes hovering in the sky. In the moonless night, it’s hard to see the clouds that play host to lightning’s energy, so the faraway flashes seem to appear from nothing. Like flickering yellow and white light bulbs high up near the roof of the world. When they draw closer and into the mountains, the thunder I hadn’t heard before now shakes branches loose from trees and causes needles to jump around, and the lightning has a start and end, jagged in between, finding outcrops of rocks or isolated pine trees high on reaching peaks. The electricity

in the air calls my hair to attention. In a bright flash I see my squad boss standing, prepared for rain that never arrives, scribbling in a notebook every time he sees where a bolt lands.

Back in May, deep into the backcountry in no-man’s land between Idaho and Wyoming, we watch a fuels crew set off a prescribed burn at 8,500 feet while there is still white snow on the ground. They drip lighted fuel onto a patch of downed trees and spring back in surprise as it rips upward immediately. We are lined up on a dirt road, holding the burn, which means standing close to the flames and sucking smoke, ready in case fire jumps the road. As the fire climbs and roars like a jet, it becomes harder to brave, but I’m stuck staring, my face glowing hot. I see a lone sagebrush 30 feet away start to shiver and shake and then it pops all at once and becomes fire. Within 20 seconds we are walking, jogging, then sprinting with our 40 pounds of gear as fire jumps the road, uphill and around the flaming front that it has become. I see wide eyes and smiles around me; we’re gripped from the escape we just made, we’re psyched at the new excitement of the day. Later, my crew boss gathers us to say he had never seen that before. Fire did not used to behave like this, at this elevation, at this time of year, in these conditions. But fire does not behave anymore. It sheds genre. It burns through trees still wet from winter.

It’s only my second year on the crew, which means I don’t know anything, so I ask questions, and I listen. In southern Utah’s heat, we hide beneath juniper trees. When

junipers burn, the berries and twigs they’ve shed over the years wheeze and complain beneath them and release a cat piss smell. Under ones not yet burnt we try to escape the sun. Our Nomex shirts used to be bright yellow, our pants green, the Kevlar chaps sawyers wear orange. Now they are browned and blackened by charcoal and dirt, and we blend into the desert. Clear sweat teases its beauty against our ash-covered faces and drips onto the earth below, and we can hear the drops sizzle against the burnt-up grass like bacon grease. The water from our plastic canteens that are kept nested in two side pockets of our faded black packs is scalding. I breathe shallow and slow, relishing in the canyon’s midday calm before my head is filled again with the chainsaw’s mechanical roar. I think that if I follow this slot canyon until it winds and deepens, I must be able to find the cold air slinking around carefully at the bottom of the desert, and a puddle of

View from hotshot crew member Caio Driver ’20: Unprecedented fire behavior has become commonplace in this changing environment.

Fred Greaves

cold, green water to jump into.

I know how bad the drought is in the West; I can feel it in the heat and I can see it in front of me in fire that’s hardly ever acted this way. I listen when there’s talk of the drought of 2002, or the Yellowstone fires of 1988, or even the Great Fire of 1910. Talk of these watershed events proves two things: though fire seems to disobey logic and reason now, it has done so in the past, and we need to reach further and further back to find parallels to the fire activity we’ve seen in the last decade. This summer, in western Montana and the Idaho panhandle, large fires sparked earlier than firefighters there had ever experienced. When we are in the northern Idaho rainforest, low-mountain country that hugs Washington and Canada, the heat record is broken multiple times over.

The trees talk up here, and they chatter and shriek all night long. Forests chock-full of tamarack, Douglas fir, ancient cedar,

mountain hemlock, and Engelmann spruce — they sound like coyotes in their surprise. They don’t remember heat like this, or nearby fires sparking so early in the summer, in this place that buzzes and breathes.

During the day, I walk through the cedars, feeling their unfamiliar leaves and bark. My squad boss yells from 50 feet downhill: “Watch out for IEDs!” He’s mostly joking, but there is a warning out for this beautiful forest we’re in. Anti-government extremists have been planting explosive devices. I come across a giant cedar that was victim of a different explosion: 20 feet up, it looks as if it had been torn in two, with straps of smoking bark sticking up like an amputation gone wrong, and massive pieces of wood strewn about as evidence of the lightning strike. The trees still standing spew fireballs back at roiling thunder cells, which pass overhead like thick ocean currents. In the rainforest with no rain, we talk too.

Stories are traded like cards. I hear about the way it was through coughs that wrack bodies. In the Great Fire of 1910, the largest wildfire in U.S. history, crew foremen used to grab young men from farms and bars and hand them hoes and crosscut saws to form a crew. How Ed Pulaski — the Pulaski tool now named for him — led his crew of felons, farmers, and kids into a cave to avoid being burned, just 50 miles from where we are now. Still, it’s estimated that 75 firefighters died in the fire. How we used to fight fire under the out-by-10-a.m. rule, which didn’t allow any fire on the landscape, helping to create the overgrown, primed-to-burn forests we have today. How, as recently as the ’90s, hotshot crews used to work 400 hours of overtime in a busy summer, while they now work at least 1,000 overtime hours every year. Working that number of hours in a six-month period grinds down even the toughest bodies, but with the seasonal work, low pay, and lack of benefits, it is also the only way most firefighters can earn a living.

We are sitting pretty at 600 hours of overtime. We get called to initial attack a fire at 2 in the morning. Tucked between a defunct ski resort and a stretch of newly built seasonal homes, there is a stand of fir trees that look black against a moonlit night sky. Some of the trees burn, some will soon. The tips of trees are like cresting waves. We stand to the side as someone falls a flaming tree, chugging powdered coffee and rushing to eat pocket snacks. We throw little sticks and rocks at each other, trading friendly insults, hilarious in our exhaustion. The tree falls and a rush of fire darts into the sky, and I see alluvial washes of embers chasing after the flames before being swept carelessly downwind, to flutter and extinguish in the air, or to start countless new small fires downhill. Alongside the embers, stars dance and blink across the sky.

There’s a gap between what scientists understand and what people have experienced, and wildland firefighters sit in that gap with a tired grin and a mouthful of chew. There’s a lot of science

They don’t remember heat like this, or nearby fires sparking so early in the summer, in this place that buzzes and breathes.

— meteorology, ecology, climatology, atmospheric physics, to name a few — that goes into wildland firefighting. Using these sciences, we’ve almost kept up with the changing fire environment. But in the field we sharpen our tools in the dirt before bed and repair broken boots with superglue and paracord. The currency between us is experience. We talk about slides — each slide is a memory a firefighter has of an incident they were on, when fire behaved a certain way, and they reacted a certain way. The more slides you have to draw from, the more fire behavior you’ve seen, the more likely it is you’ll figure out what to do when you find yourself in a situation you’ve never been in before. In today’s climate, where unprecedented fire behavior is commonplace and we often find ourselves in new situations, slides are even more essential. Slides of extreme fire behavior are ingrained into experienced firefighters, so that when the situation arises, they react quickly. Tales around the campfire double as practice for the real thing. Stories, then, in concert with science, are what keep us alive. There is the simple formula to put out a wildfire: work long, hard hours, using chainsaws and hand tools, to remove fuel from the fire’s edge to secure it. After the edge is secure, go through on hands and knees and touch everything to make sure it’s out. Even with aircraft, engines, and bulldozers, it can take thousands of people working around the clock for months to put large fires out. We wake up every morning in the dirt, head to the fire, cut and dig line around it, then head back to the dirt to sleep. We work 16-hour days for two- or threeweek tours, then have three days off before the next one.

We are sent south from the Teton area, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for a new start, only to find it had been monsooned on, effectively stamping it out by the time we arrive a day and a half later. So, we are sent back up north, to a fire an hour from where we came, in remote mountains along the Salmon River. When we arrive, it’s clear why I’d been told it was a storied — and dangerous — place to fight fire. From the network of creeks and rivers, the hills shoot 2,000 feet straight upward at 100% slope or steeper. One side of the canyons is covered in all kinds of pines — Dougs, lodgies, and whitebarks — while the other, southerly facing sides are imposing walls of flammable brown grass, sprinkled with the more desert-happy sagebrush or Ponderosa pine. The whole place is admired by a dull orange sun; made somber by the smoke squatting all throughout the valleys.

At sunset, it feels calm, but with fastburning fuels on that steep a slope, fire can cover hundreds of feet in seconds.

For days, then, we wait. We cut contingency fire line miles from the actual fire. Even so, every morning and again in the afternoon we rehash our escape route, should the winds change and blow the fire upcanyon at us. Five days into our time at the fire, we’re rushed to a cobalt mine, rumored to be the only working cobalt mine in the country, to fight the fire direct. Apparently we have the president’s best wishes. We pick up the line near an immense sludge pond and fall into the normal routine: cut, move, dig. It feels good to be working, to have ash everywhere, to see open flame. The next day, we keep working, picking up where we left off. Only this time, the winds pick up. The forecast predicted this, but not to this extent. Winds flow in at 60, 70 miles per hour. We end up huddled as a crew in the only spot of burntout black where there are no trees within falling distance. A gust sprays my face with sticks, and through the swirling ash I see 30 trees drop one after another. Green trees, dead trees, it makes no difference. All across radio frequencies, people are checking in on one another. It’s frantic, dangerous, and fun as hell.

The next day the incident commander pulls us from the line because the command team doesn’t know whether cobalt — in the air, the dirt, the trees that turned into the smoke we breathed in — is poisonous to inhale or not. With the downtime, we sit at the bottom of a socked-in valley filled with that same smoke, and we tell stories about the last couple days — the medevacs that led

to us being pulled from the line, the wind event. Everyone has their own version of the events. Even our crew boss chimes in, telling us he’d never seen anything like what had happened with the wind event; here was another new slide for him. We feel jerked around, misled, and unknowledgeable. But we’re used to that. We’re flexible; we laugh at ourselves and the job. There’s a saying when the work gets tough: The best fire is the one you’re on.

So why do we chase lightning? Why do we stick our bare hands into the burnt carcasses of trees to see if they’re still hot, though we’re not sure if they might burn us? Not just because it’s what we’ve always done, but because the absurdity makes sense. Nonsense lives in the space between facts and experience, and in the dissonance between the macro and the micro. When a grand canvas is painted, with ineffective politics, millions of miles of ice caps melting, a decried worldwide economic system, then sure — it’s ridiculous for four of us with garden tools to drive, circling on old logging roads cut into mountains, after a wisp of smoke reported by a tourist driving through a canyon miles from here. But when the smoke turns out to exist, when we stamp out the small fire before it slicks off the entire hillside, and we hear the aspen around us dance in the wind, the absurd becomes intelligible.

Even so, there are many more moments to the opposite effect. Times when the job feels so ridiculous, it can’t be coherent. But we know the worst is partnered with the most euphoric; these are the moments we learn to embrace. When we’re asked to dig and cut like our lives depend on it in the

Fred Greaves

middle of the Nevada desert because sage grouse is a protected species, and on the third day we look up from our work to see a family of those grouse waddle past us and right into the flaming column. No wonder they’re endangered. Or when we are on day 11 of an assignment and the incident commander keeps us around even though the fire’s out. On a day like this, three of us are sent 100 feet into the black, trudging through charcoal trees and next to candied fields painted by retardant drops. We’re sent to knock out a smoking stump, which essentially means, keep busy. For the next two hours, then, we take turns hitting the stump with our Pulaskis, scraping away the embers to let them cool in the open. We laugh, imitate friends and bosses, and spit. Downhill, away from the fire, the whole of Montana stretches out, just for us. On these days that lack meaning, we find it in ourselves, and in each other. My boss once said that when you’re working a stumphole, on some mountain, on a 100-degree day, and you’re shootin’ the breeze with your crew, life just makes sense.

So when friends and family across the country ask why there is so much smoke and haze in the air, I joke that it’s because I’m not doing my job properly, and hang up the phone to take off my left boot before bed, but not my right, since my ankle is so swollen I wouldn’t be able to get the boot back on in the morning, and it has been this way for weeks. We sleep in a squat valley, 20 of us strewn across the prairied ground in sleeping bag–shaped bumps. Just a few miles away, in the steep, forested mountains, the fire is only 20% contained. We can just make out its nighttime glow. And there are Cottonwoods here, and in them the wind sounds like rain, and rain also comes as dark and meandering virga over the horizon as dogs are beaten and yelp on private land near where we sleep, and there are trains whistling and gunfire pop pop popping in the just barely audible distance. I roll over to my side, and sleep with blades of bear grass crawling over my hand.

Reflection

A Close Call

What a difference a year makes.

Ihave worked in the nutrition world since 2010, and health has been very important to me: eating organic, paying attention to chemical exposures, and incorporating exercise into my routine.

My mom had breast cancer when she was my age, so in early February 2023, as I was turning 44, I decided to get a Prenuvo fullbody MRI scan as a birthday gift to myself. I also had some perimenopause symptoms, and it seemed like a great idea to get a baseline scan so that I could see changes in my body as I aged.

I had learned about Prenuvo, a private company that offers whole-body MRI scans that can detect more than 500 conditions, through my work. I have been studying oncology nutrition and metabolic therapies for several years with the Oncology Nutrition Institute, and I see clients remotely to help them change their health. If anyone was equipped to deal with what was to come, it was me.

went to cancer, and it was a sleepless night.

The next morning, I called Prenuvo at 6:30 a.m. and scheduled time to speak with the nurse practitioner at 5 p.m. I went to work and anxiously awaited my appointment.

When the time came, the nurse practitioner started at the top of the body and with the most immediate concern: “You have a 2.3- by 2.4-cm mass in the right temporal lobe of your brain.” It was the size of a walnut! How could I have had no symptoms? I was dumbfounded. But I kept my calm as we went through the rest of the results, and I learned a few more things about what was going on inside my body.

This defining moment initiated the journey I have been on ever since. At that point, we did not know whether the mass was benign or malignant, but my oncology nutrition spidey sense kicked in. I immediately started a therapeutic ketogenic diet as my training dictates, in case it was the worst-case scenario, and I started working on figuring out other contributing factors that could have impacted this tumor.

Over the next couple of months, I was recommended to one of the best surgeons in the world to do my brain surgery in Arizona. I had surgery on April 5, 2023, at Barrow Neurological Institute. In our consultation on the day before, the surgeon said to me, “Are you sure you haven’t had any seizures? This tumor is compressing your right hippocampus nearly in half, and that can cause seizures.” I had never felt so grateful in my life. A seizure while driving could very well have killed me and/or others.

The surgery went well, the surgeon removed the whole tumor, and I was discharged from the ICU 24 hours after it ended. Two weeks later, I found out that my tumor was a grade 3 oligodendroglioma, which means it was cancerous. What would have happened if I had not done the wholebody MRI? It is impossible to know.

— Since graduating from Colgate as an international relations major, Caio Driver ’20 has spent his summers as a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. He grew up in San Francisco, where he lives when he’s not on base in Pollock Pines, Calif. Driver earned his MFA at the University of Wyoming. A version of this essay was originally published in the North American Review on Oct. 20, 2022.

I went in to get my scan while on a trip to the Bay Area. This was the first MRI I had ever had. When it was finished, the tech asked me about a note in my intake form about losing my sense of smell, and I explained that I lost it during a COVID-19 infection in early 2022. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a clue to what was to come.

Afterward, I went to work, followed by a dinner with colleagues. When I arrived back at my hotel at 9 p.m., I had a message from Prenuvo, telling me that there was something concerning in my scan, and that they needed to speak with me as soon as possible. I called back, but it was late, and the nurse practitioner who explains the results was not available. Given my work experience, my mind

In the 11 months following the scan, I made great changes to my diet and lifestyle — even moving cross-country in order to be closer to my neurosurgeon and better health care options. Because the entire tumor was removed, I am currently classified as “no evidence of disease.” My surgeon thinks that I will be just fine, as long as I maintain my diet and stay in good health. I will live a much longer, healthier, and happier life, and I am grateful to have had the ability to take control of my health.

— Andrea Schaffer ’01 sees clients remotely through her Mesa, Ariz., practice, Not Just Broccoli Oncology Nutrition. She helps clients personalize their diets and lifestyles to discourage cancer.

Sustainability

SCENE

Colgate’s Canopy

Since 2018, the University has planted 763 trees — bringing the total number of trees on campus to approximately 3,500. This represents a more than 20%

increase in the number of campus trees during the last five years, excluding naturally wooded areas.

This work “makes campus more beautiful, but it’s more than just that,” says Landscape Project Manager Katy Jacobs. “We’re making campus more resilient.” Adding tree cover and increasing the diversity of tree species on campus helps make

the campus more adaptable to extreme weather and climate change, she explains. These efforts are a mixture of resilience and mitigation, adds Director of Sustainability John Pumilio. “As trees grow, they sequester carbon,” he says. “It’s part of a strategy to reduce the impacts of climate change by taking carbon out of the atmosphere.”

The following numbers are indicators of Colgate’s healthy campus, but they also demonstrate benefits for humans and animals. Forests purify the air, reduce soil runoff, provide cooling, mitigate storm impacts, and provide ecosystem services and habitats for wildlife. “A healthy tree canopy helps make the campus landscape more healthy, habitable, and enjoyable — which is good for physical and mental well-being,” Jacobs says.

→ Most common species of trees on campus: Sugar maple, Norway spruce, Northern red oak

→ Pollution removal: 1,215 pounds/year

→ Carbon sequestration*: 22 tons/year

→ Carbon storage*: 1,830 tons stored in 2021

→ Oxygen production: 57.81 tons/year

→ Avoided runoff: 82,340 cubic feet/year

→ Bird species seen on and around campus: 81

*Pumilio explains carbon sequestration and storage as follows: “As trees grow, they’re pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turning it into branches, roots, and leaves. They’re turning the carbon dioxide into carbon, the building material. They’re sequestering it. That becomes the storage. Each time [we’ve measured] our forest, the annual rate of sequestration increased, and our amount of storage continues to increase, which is an indicator that our forests continue to grow and mature.”

These data were analyzed using the i-Tree Eco model developed by the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station. The data were last collected in 2021, so the numbers have likely increased some. “Trees are pretty slow growing, so we don’t anticipate tons of changes,” Pumilio says.

— Aleta Mayne

In addition to campus trees, Colgate has more than 1,000 acres of nearby forested land.

Q&A

The Essentials of Colgate’s Hiking Club

The wilderness surrounding Colgate University is a nature lover’s dream. In the fall of 2016, the Colgate Hiking Club was established to help more students realize this dream. But during the pandemic, the once-thriving club nearly died out because most of the original leaders graduated. Yet, there were still hundreds of registered members, so Ryan D’Errico ’25 took the initiative to revive the club. By the next semester, hundreds more joined. Today, it has 300 active members and is one of the most popular clubs on campus. “Appreciation for Mother Nature is something a lot of students value,” he says. Here’s more from D’Errico:

What’s the club’s mission?

The Hiking Club provides opportunities for students interested in spending time with each other outdoors in a less formal manner than Outdoor Education’s skillbased P.E. classes. Our more casual and spontaneous hikes on campus are always popular, and we love to go to places in the region that club members suggest. To promote being active in the outdoors to a wide range of students, we have also collaborated with other organizations on campus,

such as Chapel House, ALANA Cultural Center, and Colgate’s international community.

What are the most popular hikes you’ve done?

Probably due to convenience, the most popular hiking destination is the Colgate Cross Country Trails. We have had more than 40 people join us on our on-campus hikes. The trails on campus are a fantastic escape from the hustle and bustle of student life. We have collaborated with Chapel House, meditating before walking through the forest at night. We love touring the quarry, walking through fields of asters and goldenrod, and seeing views of the sweeping rolling hills that surround Hamilton. One fun tradition we have every December is our sleddingunder-the-meteor-shower hike. The Geminid meteor shower peaks every December around finals, making this hike and sledding event a perfect study break. Despite Colgate being notoriously cloudy in December, we have had breaks in the clouds every time we do a meteorshower hike. It’s almost as if nature is supporting our club.

In terms of off-campus destinations, Tinker Falls [in

Tully, N.Y.] has consistently had a great turnout. The hike goes behind a gorgeous waterfall and up to a beautiful overlook. The falls freeze in the winter and create fascinating ice formations. There was one trip to Tinker Falls when the van got stuck in the mud, and everyone had to work together to push the van out!

What’s your favorite memory from a hike?

One great memory I have was from climbing the Kane Mountain fire tower in the southern Adirondacks. I remember being with a few others and climbing to the top of the rickety tower as the wind picked up and we could see sheets of rain approach us. Spectacular views of lakes and mountains in all directions emerged as we climbed higher above the trees, but the visibility soon dropped as the rain engulfed us. The experience was thrilling, with the adrenaline making me feel like I was on a roller coaster. When we reached the top, we looked down at the tiny club members beneath us who could barely hear anything we tried to yell down to them.

— Bri Liddell ’25

13 bits

1

Diana and John Colgate ’57 helped support a new imaging center at Glen Cove Hospital on Long Island.

2

The Minority Association of PreMed Students hosted events with the biology department, including a scientific literature workshop.

3

Fox Sports host Rob Stone ’91 was named the 2023 recipient of the Jerry Yeagley Award for Exceptional Personal Achievement.

4

Dining Services’ “feel good” series put their spotlight on omega-3 rich foods during the month of February.

5

At a ’Gate After Dark event, mentalist Dustin Dean read students’ minds.

6

Former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow met with studentathletes and spoke at a University Church service.

Illustrations by Toby Triumph

The Hiking Club at Bald Mountain in the Adirondacks mark diorio (TOP)

7

A “Helping Is Healing” dialogue about faith, mental well-being, counseling, and charity was led by psychotherapist

Mohammed ElFiki.

8

The COVE hosted two spring break service trips with Habitat for Humanity in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Pathfinder Village in Edmeston, N.Y.

9

Shaw Wellness Institute hosts Wagging for Wellness study breaks with therapy dogs.

10

A group of first-generation students toured grad schools offering public health, psychology, and social justice programs in Philadelphia.

11

A beginner’s boxing class is offered in the Huntington Gym MMA studio.

12

Kathryn Bertine ’97 made the list of 50 Most Influential People in American Cycling.

13

Colgate’s Women’s Studies Program has been renamed to the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program

Spirituality Student-Led Serenity

Look around. The warm glow of amber stained glass envelops the circle of strangers and friends — Colgate students and faculty and staff members — gathered for an early morning meditation

At Chapel House, just grab a cushion and engage in a practice that allows student meditation leader Chris Vanderhoef ’27 to settle down, breathe, and reflect.

“As serious as I am about my studies, meditation allows me to step back and say, OK, maybe you don’t have to be a student right now,” says Vanderhoef. “Maybe you can just simply be.”

Vanderhoef’s day starts just before 8:30 a.m., when he heads up to Chapel House to lead a 15-minute session. As an employee of Colgate’s workstudy program, Vanderhoef was trained by Chapel House staff. They encouraged him to attend a variety of their meditation programs, such as guided outdoor walks and their sound-bowl series, to build his knowledge.

“These practices have improved my quality of life,” he says, “so I want to help the campus community by spreading them.”

Since Vanderhoef took Professor of Religion Georgia Frank’s FSEM class called Belonging, Becoming, and Beyond, he has continued to question the beyond. “Meditation is a type of belonging,” he says, as he is often joined in his sessions by returning students. “But there’s certainly a higher level to it, a beyond. It’s really a mysterious practice, with elements you can’t explain.” Student meditation leaders hail from all disciplines, such as peace and conflict studies major Gillian Lustenberger ’27. Lustenberger, who also took her FSEM with Frank, fills the 5 p.m. slot. Her sessions adopt a Zen Buddhist style.

“We focus on the body to improve the participants’ ability to be in the present moment,” says Lustenberger, who has found anxiety relief in the process. “I don’t get panic attacks anymore.”

Each of her sessions ends with a group debriefing, where participants are called upon to share their experience. “To hear that the meditation helped someone relax or be in a better head space for the day is so rewarding,” says Lustenberger.

“I love being a part of Chapel House,” she adds. “It is such an uplifting, welcoming space where people can take a break from their busy lives and just exist.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

Unity. It began with an introduction from Rhoman Elvis ’25 and a performance of the Black National Anthem by Blessed Jimoh ’24.

A trailblazer in LGBT African American history, Brooks shared his perspectives on the transformative power of love as understood through his examination of the sermons of Martin Luther King Jr.

“I feel as though MLK is my personal mentor despite his being assassinated many years before my birth,” Brooks shared.

Drawing inspiration from King’s 1967 speech outlining the three sins of the country — racism, excess materialism, and

Chris Vanderhoef ’27 leads meditation at Chapel House.

Mike Roy (BROOKS); mark diorio (Vanderhoef)

At the intersection of love and oppression is where we can find a love drought.

militarism — Brooks delved into the theme of love as a means to combat societal challenges. He emphasized the centrality of love to the human experience, invoking King’s words, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only love can do that.”

In the interactive session that followed his speech, Brooks encouraged those gathered to engage in a collective pause, reflect on their motivations for attending, and personally define love. “What is love to the oppressed?” inquired Brooks. “What is love to the socially marginalized? What is love to the person who has been pushed to the margins of society, left out, exploited, and manipulated?”

Brooks argued that love, when unexamined, can become a tool of oppression. “At the intersection of love and oppression is where we can find a love drought,” he said. “So many of us operate and walk around so desperate for affirmation that we actually dry up. We are deprived, become desperate, and finally desiccate. To fix a love drought, a person must be treated much in the same way that a desiccated plant is treated with water: The person must be submerged in love.”

In addition to the keynote, the MLK Week celebration included a unity dinner, a day of community service, a Social Justice Summit, an Interfaith Creativity in Justice Dialogue, and a Sunday service.

— Bri Liddell ’25

Colgate’s celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. was organized by the ALANA Cultural Center and the Office of the Dean of the College.

Eco-art Breaking Down Boundaries, Building Up Community

Drawings by Troy, N.Y., community members inspired the design of the fence posts installed in Professor Margaretha Haughwout’s DE-FENCE. She traced the drawings using vector graphics, which were carved into kiln-fired walnut posts. Colgate carpenter Chris Naylor CNC (computer numerical control) routed the wood. Haughwout then filled the carvings with pewter, a process helped by studio safety technician Kevin Donlin.

Fences coming down and neighbors coming together. That’s the concept behind Associate Professor of Art Margaretha Haughwout’s living participatory art installation titled DE-FENCE.

The installation connects people with their community — and their environment — along the Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail in Troy, N.Y. The trail embeds art, culture, ecology, and history into a nature walk. It’s part of the NATURE Lab, coordinated by Kathy High ’77, which links local scientists and artists with an international network in the field of bio-arts.

The NATURE Lab and adjacent Eco-Art Trail are located in an impoverished neighborhood on 6th Street in Troy near the Hudson River. “There’s a long history of environmental racism [there],” says Haughwout. “So [NATURE Lab does] a lot of work in the community to try to reckon with that.”

Haughwout’s project began last summer with a drawing event during which participants discussed the neighborhood’s environmental health conditions, discovered medicinal plants growing in the marginal spaces and edges of the neighborhood, and sketched medicinal plants that have historically been used for the immune system. Examples include elderberry, which grows in hedgerows and is traditionally used for the flu; yarrow, which is found on the roadside and is for the cardiovascular system; and nettle seed, an edge plant that is used to induce a healthy response to external stressors.

DE-FENCE is “thinking about making the fence line its own

space that can actually bring people together,” Haughwout says, “but also bringing about greater health, greater bodily defense, through collectivity.”

She took the sketches drawn by community members (with participants’ permission), digitally traced them, and etched them onto fence posts she filled with pewter. Participants drew their sketches in a nonlinear way, having multiple endpoints so that they could connect to other participants’ drawings.

This May, Haughwout is placing the first group of fence posts around the living installation — “not in a row, but this deconstructed fence feeling,” she says. During that community event, neighbors will plant medicinal plants alongside Haughwout, whose work typically involves a pedagogical element with sitespecific teach-ins to talk about the context of the project.

Another phase of planting is planned for this fall or next spring. “It’s staggered because I want to see what’s doing well, what might need to be replaced, and work with the site instead of just dropping in, planting everything, and leaving,” Haughwout says.

She told Hudson Mohawk Magazine: “As individuals our health means nothing unless we’re thinking about our larger ecologies, our larger environment, as well as the health of one another.”

— Aleta Mayne Haughwout’s father, Peter ’50, was a medical practitioner, which motivated Margaretha to learn about herbalism at an early age.

Sina Basila Hickey for The Sanctuary of Independent Media; Bottom (3): Mark DiOrio

Senior project

It’s Alive!

What do you get when you combine majors in studio art and environmental geology?

A tree in the Clifford Gallery.

A studio art project by Riley Farbstein ’24 comes in two parts, just like her major programs in studio art and environmental geology. The first piece, made of discarded fastfashion mailers sewn together, resembles a dress. The second piece is, well, alive — it’s a small apple tree supported by its own “dress,” made of cardboard and emerging vines.

Farbstein’s project was displayed among those of other senior art students in the exhibition Pushback — a series of vivid, cumulative pieces. With her specialized knowledge in eco-art, Professor Margaretha Haughwout served as her mentor.

“I’m a multimedia artist, so I wanted my final project to combine the topics of environmental consciousness, art, and fashion,” says Farbstein.

Thus, her two-part project came to life — in the first, A Repurposed Fashion Studio, this happened in a literal way.

“I made a dress-shaped ecosystem for a tree to offer a means of protection,” Farbstein explains. “I wanted to critique fashion as a sort of armor or something that only humans have.”

Farbstein’s tree is supported by a base of recycled cardboard in tiers that resemble a dress. A strip of grow lights installed by the Clifford Gallery staff keeps underlying vines and mushrooms alive, as they grow to shape the style from holes and propagation tubes in the base. Farbstein asserts this piece in contrast to its neighbor, Fast Fashion, her mailer-made dress. As vines envelop the base of her treeproject, Farbstein’s Fast Fashion dress remains unchanged.

“Placing my pieces next to each other conveys a message:

the duality of artificial and disposable fast fashion versus more sustainable, conscious protections for our planet,” says Farbstein. “The fast-fashion industry generates so much plastic that just gets thrown away, and a lot of people do the same thing with clothes.”

To make the plastic dress, Farbstein mimicked the massproduced styles sold by fastfashion retailers — she sewed their mailers into a wearable garment, which she displayed on a mannequin.

“By repurposing plastic bags as fabric and assembling a flashy gown, I ask that observers reconsider how their plastic waste can be reutilized,” says Farbstein.

And although her art critiques mass purchasing from fast-fashion websites, she contends that these purchases need not be the end of the cycle.

“By cherishing waste as a precious material, garbage could be reutilized and explored as a source of material,” she says.

— Tate Fonda ’25

Other senior art projects include:

Emma Barrison’s Three Steps to Forget a Memory You Never Wanted to Make overlays personal photographs with colorful brushstrokes to reconstruct painful memories.

Thomas Cernosia’s One and Chairs juxtaposes AI-generated images with his illustrations to argue for the necessity of handmade images in today’s digital landscape.

Jordan Hurt’s Such a Chore social experiment features takehome postcards with playful instructions for mundane tasks (e.g., “Disorganize the silverware!”) to evoke joy and spontaneity in the viewer.

Mark Williams (4)

Academics

A SAMPLING OF SPRING HEALTH-RELATED COURSES

Cancer Biology (BIOL 337 A) with Professor Engda Hagos. How can cancer develop, worsen, or eventually subside in affected patients? This course provides students with knowledge of tumor cell signaling, DNA damage, and current therapies as they investigate this medical phenomenon.

Out of Control: Pre-Modern Psychology (ENGL 153 A) with Professor Lynn Staley. What can Aristotle, Virgil, and Homer tell us about the way our brains work? These early writers, who express anger, passion, and despair in their stories, are at the forefront of this contemplative, cross-subject course. Students combine the principles of English and neuroscience studies as they ponder how pre-modern writers have personified the workings of various mental faculties.

Public Health in Africa (ALST 334 AX) with Professor Rebecca Upton. Using an anthropological lens, students in this course review African institutions and practices pertaining to public health. They reflect on the history of the continent up to the present day, where politicians and forms of knowledge production are but a few factors

that influence disease prevention across the region. To learn about these dynamics, students complete a Community Needs Assessment based on in-depth learning about a community on the continent.

Hunting, Eating, Vegetarianism (ENST 324 A) with Professor Ian Helfant. Is the “hunting instinct” an innate aspect of human identity? How do human intervention and agriculture affect ecosystems, and what emerging technological and cultural trends offer promise for the future? These questions, among others, enter the classroom in this ethics-based investigation into how we source our food and what we decide to eat.

Genetics (BIOL 202 A) with Associate Professor Jason Meyers. This course introduces students to the study of how organisms encode, regulate, and inherit their genomes. To engage with the subject, students read primary literature and learn how to design their own studies. They bring their studies to a social-critical level as they consider the ethics regarding genomic editing and other technologies.

Health and Healing in Ancient Mediterranean Religions (RELG 232 A) with Professor Georgia Frank. In parts of the Ancient Mediterranean world (c.500 BCE), illness was defined as more than a physiological problem — it was also seen as a spiritual, aesthetic ailment. In this course, students develop an appreciation for the culturally patterned ways in which people have come to identify and treat bodily distress.

Medical Anthropology: Culture, Health, and Social Justice (ANTH 222 A) with Assistant Professor Emily Avera. Students are introduced to an interdisciplinary field that synthesizes relationships among cultures, institutions, the environment, disease, and healing. Discussions center around cultural interpretations of sickness and healing, the effects of poverty on health, and the importance of doctors in society, among other topics.

Close Relationships (PSYC 342 A) with Associate Professor Jennifer Tomlinson. Relationships can be a source of great joy when they’re strong and great sorrow when they’re weakened. Only recently, behavioral researchers have turned their attention to this familiar process as they inspect the inner workings of platonic, familial, and romantic relationships. In this course, students explore leading theories and empirical studies about adult relationships.

Critical Global Health (ANTH 226 A) with Visiting Professor Milica Kolarevic. This course examines how people experience, use, and critique global health interventions, and why sociological and anthropological approaches to global health are critical to improving these interventions.

— Tate Fonda ’25

Learn how Colgate prepares students for careers in the health sciences: colgate.edu/ academics/pre-professional-programs/ health-sciences

Illustrations by Bernie Freytag

Athletics and Counseling Team Up

National statistics show that the number of student-athletes who struggle with mental health is comparable to the general student population. Even so, only 10% of college athletes who have mental health conditions seek help, according to the nonprofit Athletes for Hope.

At Colgate, the Office of Counseling and Psychological Services has teamed up with the athletics staff to normalize and reduce any stigma associated with mental health care.

“Athletes struggle historically to utilize these services,” says Steve Chouinard, senior associate athletics director for health and performance. “There has been an ‘athletes are tougher’ [attitude] that you can battle through anything, from [a hurt] ankle to a mental health issue.” Chouinard has been collaborating with counseling staff members Dawn LaFrance, Christian Beck, and Christy Reed.

For the past five years, Beck has hosted satellite hours at Reid Athletic Center. Students can sign up for a meeting with him or just drop in for casual conversation. In the beginning, Beck wasn’t seeing a lot of faces come through his door, but “now there’s plenty of traffic, so that tells me that there was a need and we just had to make it more accessible,” says LaFrance, assistant vice president of counseling and psychological services.

Beck’s clinical interest is in sports performance anxiety, and he’s also been an athlete himself, so “I’m able to understand their timelines, their commitments with lifts, practice, traveling — all that they’re juggling.”

The counselors also have Wellness Wednesdays for the coaches and athletics administrators, leading seminars, workshops, or presentations on various health and wellness topics. Sometimes, they’ll enlist the help of other Colgate experts — for example, Dr. Ellen Larson ’94 (director of Student Health Services) and professors Krista Ingram (biology) and Lauren Philbrook (psychology) came to talk to the group about the importance of good sleep habits.

“The work we’ve been doing on Wednesdays is invaluable, and the conversations that occur after are sometimes even more valuable,” Chouinard says. “I know, for a fact, that a bunch of coaches feel a lot better having gone through it.”

He says that this training is “not dissimilar to teaching a coach how to do CPR. They can be a really important resource for a student in crisis.” LaFrance adds that they’re giving coaches some skills, but also helping them know when it’s time to refer the students to a counselor.

One assessment measure the athletics staff has implemented is on the survey student-athletes complete before their workouts. The eight questions ask about the student-athlete’s current status and condition, but there are two questions related to mental health. By combining these responses with their personal knowledge of student-athletes, athletic trainers and strength coaches can have a sense of when to check in with student-athletes or guide them toward other resources. Sometimes they’ll refer a student to counseling, but often the conversation can end with the student just being grateful someone is looking out for them.

For an additional safety net, student wellness advocates who are volunteers on each athletic team are trained by counselors to offer peer-to-peer support. “If you don’t want to talk to a coach or a counselor, but you want a resource on campus, they’re well versed,” Chouinard says.

The work we’ve been doing on Wednesdays is invaluable, and the conversations that occur after are sometimes even more valuable.

This multipronged approach is just one part of the University’s integrated health and wellness programming, where staff members from various areas come together to keep students safe and healthy. “We’re learning more and more about how the brain and body work together,” LaFrance says, “so we can’t just involve one area without it all.”

— Aleta Mayne

Volleyball Fifth-Year Senior Continues Career Overseas

Middle blocker Sophie Thompson ’24 signed a professional contract with Volley Club Marcq en Baroeul in France.

Mark DiOrio

Thompson will be competing for the team in Marcq-enBaroeul, France, with its regular season running from October–April. Thompson is one of two Americans on the current roster, joined by UCLA star Tristin Savage. The team competes in the LNV Ligue A Féminine (LAF), the top division of French women’s volleyball.

“We couldn’t be more proud of Sophie,” Head Coach Ryan Baker says. “She had an unbelievable career here capped by finishing in the top five nationally in blocks/set during her fifth year. She’s been a tireless worker from the day she arrived on campus, and now she’s doing great things on the pro circuit.”

Thompson helped lead Colgate to its third-consecutive Patriot League championship by leading the conference in blocks and blocks per set (1.53), good for fifth in the country. She set an NCAA single-match record with 17 blocks against Bucknell (Oct. 20).

“Winning the Patriot League three times and getting to compete against top-10 teams in the nation has prepared me for the high-level play in France,” Thompson says.

The Frisco, Texas, native completed her Colgate career ranked No. 1 in the record books in block assists (428) and eighth in solo blocks (90). A second team All-Patriot League selection in 2023, Thompson suited up in 129 matches, compiling 578 kills, 52 service aces, 154 digs, 518 total blocks, and a .285 hitting percentage.

Thompson continues Baker’s strong pipeline of recent graduates — Julia Kurowski ’22, Alli Lowe ’21, and Alex Stein ’20 — as former Raiders to sign with professional teams overseas.

— Jordan Doroshenko

Raising Money for Childhood Cancer Research

Hunter Drouin ’26 was a happy, seemingly healthy kid. But just days before his third birthday, his life and his family’s lives changed.

Hunter was wrestling with his 5-year-old brother, Mason, when Mason landed on top of Hunter. The younger boy suddenly felt a sharp, fiery pain in his stomach. His mother held him, trying to ease his discomfort, until he fell asleep. The hope was he’d feel better after a good nap. But things only got worse.

While Hunter was asleep, he started heaving; his skin turned cold and clammy. He was taken to the local emergency room and then transferred to a children’s hospital in New Hampshire. Doctors found a ruptured tumor in his kidney and diagnosed him with a rare kidney cancer called Wilms tumor, which generally affects children.

Drouin underwent emergency surgery to remove the organ before the tumor spread, followed by months of chemotherapy and radiation. Life slowly returned to normal for Drouin and his family, though every five years he needed blood tests to ensure the cancer had not returned. Drouin has been in remission for the last 16 years.

“If my brother didn’t land on me that day, who knows what would have happened,” says Drouin, a member of the men’s lacrosse team. He wants to use his story to give hope to others with the disease, as well as help raise money for childhood cancer research.

Each season, men’s lacrosse selects a cause for raising awareness and donations. This year, the team partnered with Lacrosse Out Cancer, a

nationwide campaign that raises money for the Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation. Men’s lacrosse gathered donations throughout the season. At press time, the team had raised more than $16,000.

“It means the world to me that my teammates and coaching staff are as invested in supporting childhood cancer research as I am,” Drouin says.

Much of Drouin’s memories from his fight with cancer are a blur, but the Derry, N.H., native knows that his community stepped up to support his family when he was undergoing treatment. People brought food and gifts; built a new swing set in the yard; raised money; and volunteered child care, dog sitting, and house maintenance during the many days when Drouin and his parents were at the hospital. “It was a team battle,” he says.

In high school, doctors restricted him from playing football, fearing an impact to his back could damage his lone kidney. But he was cleared to play hockey and lacrosse, as long as he used extra padding. He excelled in lacrosse, piling up goals, and he caught the attention of colleges (including Colgate) who wanted to recruit him.

Colgate offered everything he wanted, and Head Coach Matt Karweck stood out. At the time, the pandemic was in the early stages and campus visits were barred. Karweck flew a drone with a camera through campus so Drouin could see the place that could be his home for the next four years. They also talked for hours on the phone. “He’s the main reason I am here,” Drouin says.

He committed to Colgate, played lacrosse for a year at a boarding school following high school, and began playing for the Raiders in fall 2022. He collected nine goals and three assists for 12 points as a midfielder, with one hat trick in a victory over Holy Cross on April 28. He led all first-years on the team in scoring.

Academically, Drouin still has another year to declare a major, but he wants to study political science and become a lawyer.

As the Raiders march forward, Drouin wants to help kids who face the same battle he did as a 3-year-old. “I want to give them a sense of hope. Good can come even from the worst of times.”

— Omar Ricardo Aquije

Lacrosse

← Thompson is majoring in geography and international relations.

Olivia Hokanson

For the second time ever, women’s ice hockey made it to the Frozen Four. Unfortunately, the third-ranked Raiders lost to the second-ranked Wisconsin Badgers 3–1 in the NCAA Semifinals. Colgate had clinched the program’s second-ever Frozen Four berth with a 3–1 victory against No. 6 Cornell in the NCAA Regional Championship.

In a three-game series of the ECAC Hockey quarterfinals, Colgate’s men’s hockey season came to an end when St. Lawrence defeated the Raiders in the first two games. The Raiders ended their regular season by winning eight-straight games at home in the Class of 1965 Arena. Colgate outscored its opponents 34–17 in that span, averaging 4.25 goals per contest.

Olivia Hokanson (bottom); Brian Miller (top)

Averill McCorkle ’25 received the Elite 90 award for the 2024 NCAA DI Women’s Ice Hockey Championship. McCorkle is majoring in psychological science and currently carries a 4.07 GPA. She was presented with the award during the NCAA Frozen Four Championship reception.

Goaltender Carter Gylander ’24 signed a two-year entry-level contract with the Detroit Red Wings.

After winning their first game over a Big East opponent and becoming the first Patriot League team to advance past the second round of the WNIT, the Raiders fell in the Super 16 of the WNIT to University of Vermont 65–55.

This was a week after Colgate secured its first postseason victory in Division I history when they soared past the University of Albany on March 21. They then beat Big East opponent Providence College in the second round of the WNIT.

Another terrific season for men’s basketball concluded in the first round of the NCAA tournament, where the 14th-seeded Raiders fell to No. 3 seed Baylor 92–67. Colgate’s season finished with 25 wins, tied for the second most in program history. The Raiders captured their fourthconsecutive Patriot League Championship and appeared in their fifth NCAA tournament in the last five years. Now in his 13th season, Matt Langel is five-time Patriot League Coach of the Year.

Olivia Hokanson (bottom); Dylan Rippe (top)

Connecting Middle and Upper Campus

Amajor landscape and infrastructure project designed to better connect the upper and middle areas of campus began in February. This project will dramatically transform the wooded hillside area between Dana Arts Center and Frank Dining Hall, improve campus pedestrian circulation from Case Library to Dana, and create a new plaza on the upper campus.

The project has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Peter L. Kellner ’65, P’87, GP’16,’19, who has previously supported several other critical elements of the Third-Century Plan, including the funding of two newly endowed faculty chairs and contributions to the Colgate Commitment financial aid initiative. The

reimagined and rebuilt hillside will be named Peter’s Glen in his honor.

Acclaimed landscape architects at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) are responsible for the Glen’s landscape design. MVVA is renowned for prominent design projects, including Brooklyn Bridge Park, Harvard Yard, and the grounds of the presidential libraries of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Construction is slated for completion in 2025.

The existing hillside will be transformed into a native landscape where water will cascade over natural stone into stepped pools alongside new pathways. There will be new spaces for gathering and a completely redesigned upper-campus plaza next to Frank Dining Hall that will drastically improve the pedestrian experience.

“Given that this project will profoundly transform our campus for the next century, I knew we needed to collaborate with the world’s best landscape architects, and MVVA was our first choice,” says President Brian W. Casey. “I learned of Michael Van Valkenburgh

during my own time at Harvard, when he led a complete restoration of Harvard Yard. The professionals at MVVA are thoughtful, deeply creative, and environmentally conscious.”

MVVA has played a critical role in every major landscape project at Colgate since 2016, including the Burke-Pinchin quad and hillside, the Bicentennial Tree planting in the Academic Quad, the restoration of Oak Drive, and the design of the new pedestrian pathways at campus entrances.

This new project is an integral part of the Third-Century Plan commitment to responsibly steward the campus and its environs and is part of a series of recent improvements designed to connect the campus community through improved pedestrian circulation up and down the hill. Kellner’s gift will also allow for improvements to the campus entrance at Oak Drive, complementing his prior support of new and expanded sidewalks, tree plantings, and Oak Drive restoration.

“I am pleased to be involved in several of the major initiatives of the Third-Century Plan,” Kellner says. “This initiative in particular will help to bolster Colgate’s commitment to environmental sustainability, while further enhancing the beauty of our campus. Colgate is fortunate to have Michael Van Valkenburgh and his great team involved in Colgate’s environmental master plan to enhance the walking experience on campus while also being ever mindful of our responsibility to be good stewards of a campus of remarkable beauty.”

Initial site work in February necessitated the clearing of hundreds of non-native and declining trees, shrubs, and overgrowth on the hillside to prepare for major excavation and earth moving. Currently, this unused area provides drainage for water flowing both from pipes and natural runoff and

Landscaping

An artist’s rendering of the plaza at the top of Peter’s Glen

feeding an undersized storm system. Much of the surrounding vegetation is either invasive or susceptible to disease and pests. A redesigned and expanded storm-water system will control runoff water volume and reduce sedimentation.

The Glen will continue to evolve as planting of nearly 500 native trees and 500 native shrubs and plants takes place during several growing seasons. Heated stairs will create a path down the hill beside a cascading stream shaded by a natural tree canopy. Plazas at the top and bottom of the walkway will provide areas for relaxation, study, and gathering.

In addition to the work on the Glen, Colgate’s main entrance on Oak Drive will be updated with new trees and plantings to complement the overall campus landscape vision and will create a clear connection to the walkway leading toward Peter’s Glen.

— Dan DeVries

Downtown Plans for Mixed-Use Building

Anew four-story, mixed-use building, designed by Maurice Walters, will replace the existing 18–22 Utica Street buildings in the Village of Hamilton. Demolition began in late February, followed by an estimated 21 months of construction. Exterior plans include a brick facade and design elements to match and enhance the historic character of downtown Hamilton.

Once complete, the building will feature 41 apartment units; one restaurant; two retail locations; a new 3,471-square-foot office space facing Madison Street; and the Partnership for Community Development coworking space, the HUB. The new apartments will be designated for Colgate faculty, staff, and for people seeking to live full time in the community. These apartments will not be available to students.

Situated between the Main Moon restaurant and the building that houses Maxwell’s Chocolate, construction plans include the expansion of an existing alleyway to create a functional pedestrian courtyard with space for a small outdoor stage and seating for events and activities.

Eighteen to 22 Utica Street is owned by the Hamilton Initiative and the project is being funded entirely by Colgate. This

construction is part of Colgate’s Third-Century Plan commitment to increase housing options for faculty and staff members as well as local residents and demonstrates the University’s continued support for economic development within the village of Hamilton. Engineers determined that replacing the former Parry’s Building was the best solution for the future, as the 128-year-old building was in need of major structural and infrastructure repairs.

“This is another step toward taking care of our local housing shortage,” says Colgate Associate Vice President for Community Affairs and Auxiliary Services Joanne Borfitz. “This will also add such vitality to the village core. You can imagine, there will be up to 80 [more] people waking up in the morning, walking on the village streets, and buying coffee and lunch in the village, and they’ll be around on the weekends. It’s really going to increase the foot traffic downtown, and that will benefit everyone.”

Most apartments will have outdoor areas, with small balconies or patios, and the fourth floor will include a shared amenity room for residents, where Borfitz says she can envision residents hosting book clubs, game nights, or birthday parties. The fourth floor will also include access to a furnished outdoor rooftop patio. The Hamilton Initiative plans to staff the building with a full-time manager to assist residents, plan entertainment activities, and to

oversee the building’s public spaces. On the Madison Street side, 37 parking spaces will be created for residents, and about half will be covered from the elements.

Village of Hamilton Mayor Ruthann Loveless MA’72 says she thinks the new construction will go a long way toward addressing a critical need within the community. “The village, town, and Colgate have all identified the need for more housing as a top priority. Too many current and potential new hires find it impossible to live in the community where they work,” Loveless says. “This new mixed-use development will help address this issue, as well as add to the economic vitality of the village and increase the tax base.”

— Dan DeVries

An artist’s rendering of the east courtyard at 18–22 Utica Street

A view from Madison Street

From Benton Center to Bernstein Hall

The Center for Arts, Creativity, and Innovation, which is nearing completion and expected to open in the fall, will be named Bernstein Hall in honor of the lead donor’s genealogical roots.

When Dan Benton ’80, H’10, P’10 decided to support the creation of a new center designed to bring together the arts and technology through a $25 million principal gift, the new anchor building on Colgate’s Middle Campus was announced in 2021 as the Benton Center.

For Benton — who made his first gift of $15 to Colgate as an undergraduate in his senior year and has donated to the University every year since — the name of the building became something he spent considerable time contemplating as construction continued.

It was during construction that Benton read a history of Jews at Colgate, written by six students and titled Repression, ReInvention, and Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate. That book, edited by Professor of Jewish Studies and Russian and Eurasian Studies Alice Nakhimovsky, was created as a culmination of a Jewish studies seminar course and paints an unvarnished picture of a time when the Jewish experience on campus was marred by admission quotas and bias.

Reading about the history of Jews at

Colgate caused Benton to reflect on his own family history, and he started to consider changing the name of the new building to honor his family’s Jewish identity. Benton’s grandfather had changed his family’s last name from Bernstein to Benton in the 1940s to defend against the rampant antisemitism of the era.

In late October, Benton made the decision to explicitly connect his identity and his family's legacy to his support of his alma mater, officially giving the new building the name Bernstein Hall.

“In choosing to dedicate this building as Bernstein Hall, I honor my family’s history. I underscore our resilience and the resilience of the Jewish people,” Benton says. “And just as the blending of the arts, entrepreneurship, and computer science has magical potential, so does the blending of diverse thought, talent, and ethnicity in a student body. It enriches everything. And with both at work, we deliver on our mission to prepare our students to navigate the challenges of the world they will graduate into. Isn’t this what the liberal arts must do?

“As a leading donor to Colgate, I am dedicated to working with, rather than against, President Brian Casey, Provost Lesleigh Cushing, my fellow trustees, and the rest of the administration, faculty, students, and alumni. I hope that Colgate will set an example for other universities by understanding how freedom of expression coexists and integrates with a diverse and inclusive community.”

For Casey, seeing the new building’s structure take form between the James C. Colgate Student Union and Dana Arts Center is a major milestone in the University’s

plans for an expanded Middle Campus and a clear signal of Colgate’s commitment to the Initiative in Arts, Creativity, and Innovation. Casey, a historian by training, notes that the renaming also harkens to other moments of history at Colgate.

“From the Benton Scholars program to the excellent career services offerings in Benton Hall, Dan’s commitment to the liberal arts at Colgate and to our students is clear. And now he is helping us recognize part of our past in a thoughtful way,” says Casey. “Jewish students, faculty, and staff have persevered on this campus throughout the years, even in the face of profound discrimination during the Cutten administration and beyond. Naming Bernstein Hall may help to address and ameliorate this history. It feels reminiscent of when we were able to name a building in the academic core of the campus for one of our first women faculty members, Jane Pinchin. Naming buildings and places can help a college recognize those who have gone before and who have shaped an institution. The buildings of a campus can, and ought to, reflect the history of those who have been here as students, staff, and scholars.”

Faculty, staff, and students will utilize the building in the fall semester for classes and creative endeavors facilitated by the building’s fabrication labs, a robotics lab, a digital recording studio, five computer labs, an experimental exhibition and performance space, a media archaeology lab, and flexible classrooms.

Cushing, provost and dean of the faculty and Murray W. and Mildred K. Finard Chair in Jewish studies, describes the new building as dynamic and exciting. “We brought together faculty from a range of disciplines to see what they could imagine at the intersection of visual arts, technology, theater, dance, music, and innovation. The building is a material manifestation of their imagination — a place where students can experiment, try new things, learn with the newest technologies,” Cushing says. “The building will be welcoming and inviting not just to the concentrator who is immersed deeply in the fields of film and media studies or computer science, but also to the student who has come for an event or to explore a course outside their regular fields of study. From Whitnall Field and Peter’s Glen, the building will draw people in. It will be a place on campus where curious, creative students can let their imaginations really roam.”

— Dan DeVries

Culture

The Way of Tea: Colgate’s Own Japanese Tea Room

On the first floor of Lawrence Hall, a newly renovated space provides a window into Japanese culture.

In early January, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures completed the renovation of an authentic Japanese tea room in the Japan Center in Lawrence Hall. Spearheaded by Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of Japanese and Linguistics Yukari Hirata, the project was funded by Colgate Japanese studies alumni.

The tea room was created to host Japanese tea ceremonies, an important element of Japanese culture since the 16th century, explains Hirata. The ceremony entails the ritualized preparation and presentation of powdered matcha tea, served warm in bowls to guests seated on tatami — the wooden or rice-straw mats that line the floor in traditional Japanese tea rooms.

“The tea room was a peaceful oasis for many who fought in wars and suffered from all kinds of life challenges,” says Hirata, who is also chair of the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures and director of the linguistics program. “The practice of tea continues today in Japan, and The Way of Tea symbolizes many cultural, historical, and artistic aspects that are visible or invisible in contemporary Japan.”

To ensure the room’s authenticity, two specialists visited Colgate from Japan this past fall. These experts outfitted the room with traditional tatami mats — which carry a distinct fragrance — as well as the sunken hearth where water is heated. Other elements in the room, including the wall scroll and flower decor, symbolize the changing seasons; each tea ceremony has its own theme.

Hirata spent her recent sabbatical in Kyoto, studying the Way of Tea with a master tea teacher. “I would wear kimono every weekend, bow to the teacher, and then come back and take notes,” she says. “What I found from that experience is what I want to teach at Colgate; you see the tea ceremony and it looks so choreographed, but it’s much more relaxed and social than people realize. It’s a social gathering.”

Hirata is sharing her knowledge in her Way of Tea course, but she hopes to

make the tea room accessible to students, faculty, staff, and even community members interested in Japanese culture.

“I want to encourage all people to come, be curious, and ask questions,” she says. “It’s part of the liberal arts education — to be open to learning about another culture and their customs.”

Eleanor Meunier ’26, a history major currently studying abroad in Japan, helped with the tatami installation in December. “Having an authentic tea room in the Japan

Center allows for immersive learning, as we are able to engage in hands-on activities as well as normal classroom learning,” she says. “When I came to Japan this semester, I was able to recognize tea spaces similar to the one we have at Colgate. It gave me a sense of familiarity in a largely unfamiliar environment. I am looking forward to returning to Colgate’s tea room and feeling as if I am back in Japan.”

— Mary Donofrio

Professor Hirata uses a small bamboo scoop called a chashaku to prepare the powdered matcha tea.

SNutrition

Food as Medicine

Helping those who require specialized diets

haron Coyle ’86 Weston calls the work she does “culinary medicine.”

“It’s really a combination of a dietitian, a chef, and a doctor,” she says of her job. As a senior clinical specialist in pediatric nutrition at Boston Children’s Hospital at Peabody, she has combined these disciplines, through research and community outreach, into a career that helps people who need that kind of medicine the most.

Coyle Weston’s research is heavily focused on blenderized formula, which is whole foods and purees that can be used in place of conventional synthetic formula. This approach to using “food as medicine” has gained significant momentum over the last decade, especially for pediatric patients who rely on formula as a major source of nutrition.

Some parents make their own blenderized formula; others use commercially prepared products and then add water to help with administration. That introduces a lot of variables, Coyle Weston says, and if the viscosity isn’t just right, it can’t move easily through a feeding tube, but if it is thinned too much, it may worsen symptoms related to reflux such as vomiting or retching.

Through her research, she is “trying to look at practical issues that are related to the delivery of blenderized formula,”

she explains. That includes determining how best to test viscosity in the first place. She and her team started by using a viscometer, which measures the fluid flow and viscosity of liquids. But they realized that viscometers don’t quite give them the right results, because blenderized formula is a non-Newtonian liquid — which means its consistency changes based on factors around it, like temperature. “It’s more of a mixture than a solution,” she says.

The team then tried International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative (IDDSI) Testing, which measures flow or textural characteristics of something right

[My job is] really a combination of a dietitian, a chef, and a doctor.

at the time of testing. An IDDSI test, for example, can measure differences in how a liquid flows when it’s hot and when it’s cold, what happens if it’s stirred by hand instead of mixed by a blender, or at what point in the process water is added.

In a 2020 paper published in the Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, she showed the effectiveness of using the IDDSI test on commercialized food-based blends to determine how much liquid was needed to reach an ideal consistency to run through an enteral feeding device pump.

Then, in 2022, she led a team that published a paper in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition that determined the differences in viscosity when a nurse adds water to the bag that holds the food versus parents adding water in a blender. “We compared stirring it, shaking it, blenderizing it. It’s all a little bit different,” she says.

In addition to this research, Coyle Weston has focused on the practical parts of culinary medicine, like teaching people how to prepare meals, especially for those who need specialized diets. For 10 years, she’s been running monthly cooking classes through the Optimal Wellness for Life program, where she’s the lead registered dietitian.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when classes went virtual, the program has been able to reach more people, on a variety of topics, including pediatric obesity and specialized diets. “For celiac disease, the only known treatment is a gluten-free diet. That’s easy to say, but how do you do that?” she says. “Culinary medicine classes instruct on different details related to dietary prescriptions from a medical perspective, and how you carry that out with the help of a dietitian and chef.”

Coyle Weston’s work doesn’t go unnoticed. In 2023 she was given the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition’s Dietician of Excellence Award. She also recently received funding for the NASPGHAN Nutrition Committee Culinary Medicine Working Group (of which she is the co-chair) to create modules about food and different GI-related diagnoses, including fatty liver disease, celiac disease, and inflammatory bowel disease. These modules will provide continuing medical education for doctors.

“Physicians will be able to deliver more hands-on information to their patients and have a better understanding of how their patients can carry out specific diet prescriptions in order to use food as medicine,” she says.

— Jen A. Miller

Research

Searching for a Cure

Ross Fredenburg ’93 is leading efforts to tackle a rare disease.

You have probably never heard of Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC). But if you follow football, you have likely heard of Ara Parseghian, the legendary University of Notre Dame football coach.

NPC disease is a rare, genetic neurodegenerative disorder that causes progressive deterioration of the nervous system and is fatal. The Ara Parseghian Medical Research Fund was started by Cindy and Mike Parseghian, the coach’s daughterin-law and son, when three of their children were diagnosed with NPC disease.

Now working with the fund is Ross Fredenburg ’93, an executive consultant who has a background in biochemistry and vast experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Fredenburg’s role is to manage the fund’s effort to develop a potential therapy for NPC within a nonprofit environment.

NPC typically affects children. The cause is a genetic mutation that blocks the normal cellular processing of cholesterol, a necessary fat, leading to lipid buildup in the cells causing enlargement of the liver, and — more critically — neural disorders. These brain ailments lead to delays in motor development, problems with gait and speech, seizures, and death. “In the cell, a process has evolved to bring dietary cholesterol into the lysosome for processing,” Fredenburg explains. The lysosome chemically breaks down cellular components to prevent accumulation and to refresh the supply of essential chemical building blocks for the cell. “It also performs regulatory functions such as cholesterol transport into the cell, where it can be used in various membranes and in the biosynthesis of other important molecules,” he says. NPC inhibits the

mechanism that moves cholesterol out of the lysosome, and the resulting buildup of cholesterol disables the cell. “Because NPC is caused by an inherited genetic mutation, every cell in the body is going to have that dysfunction,” Fredenburg explains.

He is currently leading an academicindustry partnership to speed up progress on the search for a cure. Fredenburg is hiring academic research laboratories to do focused experiments that will help him home in on the specific information needed to develop a drug to combat NPC. He points out the necessity of such an approach, because NPC is a rare disease and, thus, there isn’t enough commercial incentive to attract the attention of a major drug maker.

Fredenburg’s first tactic in his search for a cure is to find a way to repair a protein in the cell weakened by NPC. “The genetic mutations that cause NPC are focused on a specific protein within the lysosome, and often these mutations reduce the stability of that protein’s structure,” he explains. “Unstable proteins are degraded rapidly within the cell, so the NPC-related protein can never reach the lysosome to perform its cholesterol-shuttling function. Stabilizing the structure of this protein may allow the mutant form to survive long enough to reach the lysosome and restore cholesterol transport.”

To find such a stabilizer, Fredenburg is tasking his lab partners to use a technique involving DNA-encoded libraries, which could be described as throwing an astronomical amount of spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. “You can take 3 billion DNA-tagged compounds mixed with one protein in solution, and the compounds that bind to your protein will be retained and the others will wash away,” Fredenburg explains. “The fact that all the compounds have specific DNA tags allows you to determine the structure of each potential binder within the set of molecules that were selected by an interaction with the protein. The key next step is to determine if compounds that bind to the protein increase its stability.” Verified stabilizers will then be tested in cell-based models of NPC disease to see if they can restore the normal flow of cholesterol, and such molecules will be further developed into drugs to treat children suffering from NPC disease.

Fredenburg says he has had promising results already, but also hopes the research model he is developing could be more widespread. “This isn’t something that happens that often, where a nonprofit with a really specific disease focus is able to develop drugs in a sophisticated way.”

— Chris Quirk

Conservation The Vital Nature of Exploration and Discovery

Gretchen Coffman ’91 empowers students and communities to restore wildlife habitats.

It’s not unusual for National Geographic Explorer Gretchen Coffman ’91 to wake up to an orangutan eating flowers outside her window. “It’s magical: the places I work, the people I meet,” she says. Since 2020, she has lived in Singapore, her home hub for traveling to forests, coral reefs, and communities around Southeast Asia.

Coffman grew up in the Southeastern United States, where she backpacked, kayaked, and developed a love for wilderness exploration that has shaped her life. Today, she is an ecologist, conservation scientist, and senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Geography. “My niche discipline of wildlife habitat restoration is interdisciplinary,” explains Coffman, who works with wildlife biologists, hydrologists, engineers, landscape architects, and others. “I weave this team-based approach into my teaching pedagogy of ‘exploration and discovery.’”

Coffman first experienced the wilderness of Southeast Asia after finishing her PhD, when she joined a team of wildlife biologists traveling to Laos. There, she discovered a critically endangered tree species in an area soon to be flooded by a hydroelectric dam. She secured a National Geographic Explorer grant to continue studying, protecting, and restoring that species.

Now, at her Tropical Restoration Ecology Lab at NUS, Coffman’s team researches habitat restoration strategies and trains students and communities to monitor projects. She regularly leads students in field experiences across Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, and the island of Borneo — home to more than 15,000 species of plants and animals, many of which live nowhere else on Earth. Her team tackles habitat restoration where palm oil plantations, aquaculture, logging, and coastal developments have damaged ecosystems that plant, animal, and human communities need to thrive.

“Working on ecological restoration projects, I have often encountered challenges of small project sizes, shortterm funding, and little monitoring of project success,” Coffman says. “Our team strives to scale up restoration efforts around Southeast Asia through engaging communities and youth.”

Exploration is so important, Coffman believes, because “people can’t protect or love what they don’t know.” By inspiring her students, she hopes they’ll join her in motivating others to help restore the wildlife diversity of the region. “At the same time, we’re exploring diverse project funding sources and novel ways communities can turn restoration into businesses that provide sustainable

livelihoods and scale up efforts.”

In June 2023, Coffman, 16 students, and 20 community organizations convened their first Community-Based Ecosystem Restoration Conference. “Sitting in an open-air pavilion,” she recalls, “orangutans and proboscis monkeys around us, we shared knowledge about restoring tropical rainforests, coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and mangrove forests — ecosystems hundreds of millions of people depend on for food, storm protection, and jobs.”

Her research team traveled again last December, visiting communities with a wide range of restoration experience. Turning restoration into a livelihood is a challenge those communities share, so Coffman’s team helped train partner organization APE Malaysia to teach community members how to raise native tree species in family-owned nurseries so they can sell them back to conservation groups and help restoration efforts.

Coffman’s team filmed as they traveled, using 360-degree cameras. Through immersive films like their award-winning Roots to Reefs 360, “we’re bringing wild Borneo to more people,” she says. They show the films at festivals, to NUS students, and, with the aid of VR headsets, to community members. “We want to help people appreciate and better understand their surrounding ecosystems, so they’ll be inspired to protect them.”

Coffman recalls a student describing her as an eternal optimist. “The challenges to biodiversity loss are vast,” she says, “but I truly believe everyone can make a meaningful difference.”

— Meghan McDonald

Coffman trains a team from APE Malaysia.

Coffman holds a baby pangolin.

Bioinformatics

Genetic Code-ing

Computer scientist Soo Bin Kwon ’16 uses algorithms to fight diseases.

When Soo Bin Kwon ’16 came to Colgate, she planned to study biology, a subject that while growing up in South Korea and attending summer science programs in Germany, she found interesting and full of meaningful problems to solve. At the same time, she didn’t like the uncertainty of experiments. “It’s a lot of patient work, pipetting in the lab and waiting for results, without any guarantee of success,” she says. During her first semester at Colgate, however, she took a computer science class with Professor Michael Hay and felt instantly at home. “The inputs and outputs were very clear — this is what you are given, and this is what you should be getting as the outcome,” she says. “The problem-solving aspect felt like my thing.”

Now, Kwon is both coding and helping solve meaningful health problems as a senior bioinformatics scientist at San Diego–based company Illumina. “I would describe bioinformatics as the intersection between computer science, statistics, and biology,” she says. Kwon looks at infectious diseases, coming up with algorithms to help biomedical organizations identify and track viruses and other pathogens. “It all started with COVID-19,” Kwon explains. During the early days of the pandemic, some companies developed the now-familiar PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests to quickly identify individual infections. Illumina took a longer view, developing sophisticated genetic sequencing and high-throughput

Kwon looks at infectious diseases, coming up with algorithms to help biomedical organizations identify and track viruses and other pathogens.

techniques to track variants of the disease as they spread through the population.

“The basic idea is to take any biological sample — it could be blood, saliva, skin cells, or even wastewater — and shred it up into small pieces,” Kwon explains. “The technology we use then reads those small pieces of DNA and tries to stitch them together into sequences we can compare to existing known sequences.” It’s Kwon’s job to help create the software that can analyze the data and give customers an accurate reading of what pathogens and genetic variants are present in their sample. “You can choose what kind of analysis you want, and then minutes or hours later our software will provide graphs and tables to help you make sense of what’s in your sample.”

Kwon started using bioinformatics in her senior year at Colgate as a research assistant in the lab of associate biology and mathematics professor Ahmet Ay. There she used data analytics to help identify a genetic control switch in zebrafish embryos responsible for proper development — a finding that could have repercussions for understanding human birth defects. Along with Ay, she also collaborated with biology professor Krista Ingram to develop a mathematical model to analyze genes that control people’s circadian clock and published their findings in Nature (Scientific Reports).

She cites the papers she co-authored as instrumental in getting her into a bioinformatics PhD program at UCLA, where she used computational biology

to examine the differences in mouse and human genomes. When the pandemic hit in 2020, she and her adviser developed tools to examine differences in viruses affecting humans and other animal species, helping to better understand coronaviruses and leading to her current role in examining infectious diseases.

Among other applications, Illumina’s technology is used to sequence genetic information for commercial providers such as Ancestry and 23andMe, optimize genetically modified crops, and study diseases ranging from cancer to rare genetic disorders. Kwon’s work on infectious diseases helps aid biomedical researchers and public health officials in genomic surveillance by analyzing wastewater and other samples to track their trends. “It could be COVID or other diseases — even influenza, which continues to evolve and could one day become more pathogenic than it is today,” she says. Though her work is still oriented toward basic research, she likes that she’s able to apply it in real time — allowing her to tackle those meaningful problems just as she always wanted to do. “If there’s monkeypox on the news, for example, we gather whatever information we can and collaborate with public health labs to give our customers what they need to study it,” she says. “My work feels very connected to the rest of the world. I can contribute something.”

— Michael Blanding

Illustration by Helen Green

A Picture of Health

As told to Aleta Mayne

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a surgeon for a day, performing open-heart surgery or restoring blood flow to someone’s brain? What about a paramedic, racing to the hospital while trying to keep a patient calm in the back of an ambulance? Or a hospice physician, whose sole mission is to keep someone comfortable as they’re dying? Colgate Magazine spoke to six medical professionals, who provided first-person accounts of their work. As different as their jobs are, all of these alumni spoke of the joy they feel in those moments when they’re connecting with the person for whom they’re caring. Illustrations by

Matthew Twombly

Northern Exposure

Betty Anderson ’14 is finishing her family medicine residency in Alaska, where she’s based in Anchorage and travels around the state for rural rotations. She says she chose Alaska because, “I wanted to work with underserved populations, and the most underserved populations in the United States are rural.” When her residency ends in June, Anderson will complete a yearlong fellowship on addiction medicine, which she’s planning to specialize in as well as stay in Alaska.

Living in Anchorage is, in many ways, like living in any other 400,000-person city — but, in some ways, it’s not. “Sorry I’m late; there was a moose” isn’t an excuse you can use everywhere. If a moose is between me and my car, I’m not going anywhere.

Work trips sometimes involve holding the vaccine cooler and my carry-ons, and stepping onto the airport scale to be weighed because they need your exact weight [to fly]. I’ve spent [time] in Bethel, Hooper Bay, Fairbanks, and Seward. Now I’m in Sitka, 600 miles from Anchorage. I’ve been onboarding and getting used to a new hospital system.

Most of the [rural] communities are off the road system — you cannot drive to them. In the winter, the only way to get to Sitka is by plane. When you land in a village, someone will pick you up and you ride outside — sometimes they’ll load you into the back of a truck or on a sled on the back of a four-wheeler or snow machine — and then they take you to the village clinic.

In Sitka, I’m doing a mix of inpatient and outpatient. I’ll be doing some ER shifts, pretty much all aspects of the hospital and the clinic. We do a fair amount of hands-on work: sutures, procedures, some dermatology. I’ve delivered approximately 60 to 70 babies. It’s whatever walks in your

door … from a fishhook stuck in the back of a kid’s head to someone coming in status epilepticus (seizing) and having to intubate and ship them off to the hospital.

Alaska has an interesting medical system where there are regional hubs, and we have a community health aide, where they train people from the community to take vitals and histories. We do radio medical transmission, where the physician in the hospital will make decisions on whether to medevac or put the patient on the next commercial plane to get to the ER.

I’ve flown on a lot of medevacs and gone out to the villages to provide medical care. A lot of these villages, they won’t have a single restaurant or a hotel. If you want to access the villages and you don’t know anyone there, you have to call them up and get permission to go. They make you bring about four days of extra food if you’re going out to a really rural village, just in case you get weathered in and can’t fly out.

We get a lot of training, and we have a month that’s transcultural medicine, where we meet with Alaska Native elders to hear their stories, learn about the history, the culture. They have a different communication style than I’m used to. They often speak lower, and they have a significant pause after each sentence. Learning about those cultural differences

can help us serve those populations.

We get alerted to the disorders that run in different populations. There are some genetic disorders that you don’t learn about when you’re studying medicine in the lower 48. Sitka and Bethel are through the Indian Health Services, Alaskan Native–run tribal health consortiums. There are different tribes in these areas, so they have different health issues. One of the things you see in Bethel that you don’t see anywhere else in the United States is there’s a lot of botulism. There’s also a lot of tuberculosis in various places and other specific health care needs.

I have a master’s in bioethics, compassionate care, and medical humanities from Stony Brook University. I’m on the ethics board at Providence Hospital. I’m doing my fellowship on addiction because it’s a massive public health crisis. Alaska has no shortage of patients suffering from it, and we have fewer resources than most communities. Having someone who can do prenatal care and also know how to treat addiction is important. A lot of people suffering from addiction don’t interface with the medical community often, but one of the few times they do is when they’re delivering a baby. If you can make it a positive interaction and give them the medical care they need, you can make significant changes in their lives and their children’s lives.

Anderson’s inspiration to practice rural medicine was her grandfather, who studied tropical medicine and ran a medical clinic in Ghana in the ’60s.

Ig et to help people when they’re not having the best of days, and for me, that is something that is incredibly rewarding: mentally, emotionally, spiritually — all of those elements come together in prehospital emergency medicine. I’m motivated by the concept of service above self and asking, what can I do to help the sick and suffering?

I work 24 hours on, 48 hours off. Our schedule runs from 7 a.m. to 7 a.m. I can be assigned to any station within Lee County, which covers 781 square miles, with a population approaching close to 1 million people. Lee County EMS responds to nearly 110,000 calls for emergency aid each year. I wake up at 4:30 in the morning, arrive at the station by 6:30, and do a truck check to make sure our equipment is ready to go.

Under the Flashing Lights

Steve Bayliss ’90 is a paramedic for Lee County EMS in Fort Myers, Fla. A former global marketing and business strategy professional for brands such as Energizer Personal Care, Captain Morgan, Nespresso, and Hawaiian Tropic, Bayliss began volunteering part time as an EMT in his hometown of Westport, Conn., five years ago. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, he told his wife: “I think I need to do EMS full time to help our communities.” The couple decided to move to Florida to be closer to family and start new careers in health care. Bayliss joined Lee County EMS in 2021.

On my last shift, the day was abnormally quiet until 5 p.m., and then we ran straight through [to the end of the shift]. Life in EMS is predictably unpredictable. We had a patient with a tracheostomy that was having difficulty breathing. We transported that patient emergently [with siren and lights] because they were going into respiratory failure. My partner and I suctioned the tracheostomy, provided oxygen, and started an IV. Airway breathing and circulation are the key things we’re assessing for on every patient. Afterward, we had a couple of falls with elderly patients. For geriatric patients, if they’re on a blood thinner, any fall that involves the head increases the risk for a brain bleed. After that, we had a cardiac arrest at 3 a.m. for a 39-year-old patient, which, unfortunately, was a negative outcome. We spent 45 minutes providing CPR and advanced life-saving protocols before declaring death. Then we, along with law enforcement, involved a medical examiner. Our command staff is very good when we have that type of call, giving us a chance to go out of service to restock the ambulance and decon[taminate] ourselves and the equipment. EMS is a profession where you have to be comfortable with getting dirty, which could be the environment or bodily fluids. Once we got the ambulance restocked and back in service, it was approaching 6 a.m. We handed the keys and the truck off to the oncoming crew, and I came home and went to sleep.

In terms of mental and emotional support, I have a great network — fraternity brothers from Colgate, friends, and family. This shift and the shift prior, we had two intense, highpriority calls. We check in with each other. Pediatric calls are always hard. Having healthy coping mechanisms and a good support network are key.

Part of what allows me to thrive in this role is I come into it with a lot of life experience. I spent most of my first career working and living globally across a range of cultures, people, and economic tiers. I bring that to work every day.

Some of the most rewarding times are the conversations I have with patients. I’ve transported Medal of Honor recipients and people who marched with Martin Luther King. I’ve been able to help someone who just immigrated here experiencing a medical crisis far from home and family. I provide calmness and reassurance to them. I’ve helped to deliver a few babies and resuscitated a few people from cardiac arrest. There’s been all the tragedy and beauty of humanity in the back of my ambulance.

Bayliss’ oldest sister Madeline graduated in the Class of 1976.

The Angiogram Suite

It’s 30 minutes before Dr. Jonathan Lebovitz ’05 is going into surgery at Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. As chief of neurointerventional surgery at Elite Brain and Spine in Danbury, Conn., he covers three hospitals.

Most of my practice is cerebrovascular or blood vessel neurosurgery — patients who have aneurysms, strokes, or stenosis of the carotid artery. In the past, everything was open surgery. Neurointervention is minimally invasive; we work through the blood vessels. The standard way is through the blood vessel of the leg and then you go up to the brain. I specialize in doing it from the arm, which neurosurgeons have only been doing for five years.

Stroke is one of the most common causes of death or morbidity in America. Typically, a patient would come in with weakness of half of their body, speech trouble, and potentially swallowing trouble. They come to the emergency room and would undergo CAT scans to make sure there’s no bleeding or brain tumor. Then they get a CAT scan angiogram, which is where the CT scanner can look at the blood vessels. If you find a blockage on the CAT scan, you call someone like me to do the surgery.

The patient would go to an angiogram suite and I would put a sheath into their arm, which is like your highway to introduce equipment into the blood vessel. It has a valve, so they’re not bleeding out, but it gives us access to bringing equipment in or out.

We bring a series of catheters, or tubes, over smaller wires that drive the catheters, and I bring them up to where the blockage is. We have special catheters where we can attach a suction device to suck the clot out. Sometimes we have to use a combination of stents and the suction if the clot is really firm. The goal is to restore blood flow to the brain to decrease the overall effect of their stroke.

In the room with me is an anesthesiologist, one or two nurses, and one or two X-ray or scrub techs who help run the machine, hand me the instruments, and prepare the patient.

I’m usually standing somewhere between the patient’s knee and hip. The catheter can be up to 5 feet long, I drive it to where it needs to go, and then there’s 6–9 inches outside of the body.

We inject contrast, which lets us see the blood vessels through the X-ray machine. It first takes a picture that then acts as a

“

The most rewarding part of my job is when someone who has had a stroke comes in not moving or talking, and after the procedure, they wake up and all of that is fixed.”

negative; it deletes all the other information so that all that you see are the blood vessels.

The catheters are like long tubes, essentially. They’ll be going in from the arm and I’ll twist or push or pull those catheters. I’ll have an assortment of monitors that I’m looking at as I’m working — usually two X-ray machines with different angles.

It could take 15–20 minutes if everything goes well, but if it becomes more complicated, it can take an hour or two. Sometimes the blood clot doesn’t come out right away, or their anatomy makes it difficult to get the equipment into the brain, so I need to develop bigger systems to overcome the twists.

I’m moving from one step to the next, working through the surgery systematically. If I lose my calm or composure, that’s not good for anybody.

I probably do 300–400 procedures a year. The hardest part of my job is telling a patient’s loved ones that their person has a bad neurologic problem and it’s not reversible. I’ve found that it’s best to be honest and use understandable terms; especially when people are in shock, you need to give them smaller bites of information and allow time for them to process it.

The most rewarding part of my job is when someone who has had a stroke comes in not moving or talking, and after the procedure, they wake up and all of that is fixed. That’s the best.

Lebovitz first became interested in this work as a clinical research coordinator at Northwestern University.

Honoring Life and Death

Mindy (Stevens) ’95 Shah majored in English at Colgate and went on to Columbia University for an MFA in poetry. Soon after, she was diagnosed with a heart arrhythmia and then suffered from the side effects of a procedure. Shah took a deferment from Columbia, during which her medical experience inspired her to earn her MD and become a doctor. She decided to specialize in geriatrics and palliative care, because “It’s a holistic approach to what’s going on with the patient and family — listening and figuring out what’s important to that patient, as well as shared decision-making with patients and families.” Today, Shah works for the Hospice of the Red River Valley, based in Fargo, N.D. She finds synergy in her work with The Good Listening Project, a nonprofit that pairs poets like Shah with other health care providers to alleviate stress in the industry. The listener poet facilitates a conversation with the person to hear about their experience and then writes a reflective poem.

The patients we work with in hospice have a prognosis of six months or less, so my goal is to meet their needs, whatever those might be. A lot of times it’s physical comfort, so symptom management; a lot of times it’s education, so letting them or their family or caregivers know what the future might look like and how might we prepare.

I live in Madison, Wis., and work hybrid. Quarterly, I go to Fargo and spend a week with the team members. The rest of the time, I am remotely managing patient issues and giving nurses support from my home. The nurses go out to these patients’ homes, the hospitals, or nursing facilities and they manage symptoms, pain, nausea, anxiety; it’s a mixture of addressing situations with medications, or with staff or family education, or nonpharmacologic ways. I’m very much relying on my nursing staff.

“ Death and dying might be something I deal with on a regular basis, but I can’t become numb to that. I need to be constantly reminding myself that this is a seminal event.”

I’ve worked in different hospice settings, some where I’ve been there in person on inpatient units. I’ve also gone out to patients’ homes and cared for them there. I’m always collaborating with nursing staff quite a bit, but especially in this position. There are a lot of safety practices we have in place and communication standards to make sure we’re giving each other information in the correct way.

The majority of our patients are geriatric, but we do have a contingent of middle-aged folks. Occasionally we have younger patients, children, and newborns.

I do video visits from my home, with patients or families, to discuss questions or concerns they have. The hospice I work for covers both metro and rural areas in North Dakota and parts of Minnesota, sometimes Native American reservations, or places without good internet connectivity. It’s important to figure out ways to make this kind of care work in a remote environment. I’m having to deal with what resources are available in the home to be able to reach out to my team members. If we don’t have a video connection, maybe we’re talking on the phone or using secure texting, or maybe we get cut off three times and we keep trying to reach out to each other. You have to problem-solve.

Initially, around the time of the pandemic, I thought video visits were not going to be as valuable because I put a lot of importance on the energy in the room and the human connection. But, actually, video visits have been great. I still feel like I’m able to make that connection with the patients and the families, without them having to leave their surroundings.

I’ve also seen this with the other work I do, with The Good Listening Project. My writing and my work in hospice and palliative care are closely linked. It has to do with witnessing, with accompanying someone on different journeys. I use the same listening skills when I’m putting a poem together for a person through The Good Listening Project as I do when I’m in a conversation with a patient or family. It’s about letting that person know they’ve been heard.

Sometimes the most memorable experiences are when I can be with a patient or family, either in person or sitting quietly over video, even if we’re not saying anything. In person, some of the most powerful experiences have been when I’ve walked in and somebody’s died. I’ll go in and just sit there with the family or alone with the patient for a few moments and honor what their experience was.

Death and dying might be something I deal with on a regular basis, but I can’t become numb to that. I need to be constantly reminding myself that this is a seminal event. I may see it every day, but this may be the first death that a family member or friend has ever seen. So I want it to always be sacred. I make a conscious effort to ground myself in those moments, whether they’re in person, over the phone, or over the computer, so it never becomes routine.

At Colgate, Shah won the Allen Prizes in English Composition; later, she won the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition.

Heart to Heart

Born into a German family specializing in construction, Dr. Bob Helm ’85 knew he wanted to become a surgeon because he always liked using his mind and his hands together, whether it was framing a door, playing sports, or drawing. Today, he is a cardiothoracic surgeon at Portsmouth Hospital in New Hampshire, performing one to three surgeries a day, five days a week, most weeks of the year.

Besides being with my family, my favorite place is in the operating room. (By the way, my wife, Jen ’86, and my daughter Chrissi ’15 graduated from Colgate; Daisy ’26 is there now.)

To me, surgery is just construction on the human body. You do each individual step as perfectly as possible, in the correct logical sequence, and you come out with a very reproducible, “perfect” result.

The older I get, the more experience I gain. This experience translates into improved and more efficient performance of my job, and it also allows me to relax and enjoy the process of fixing hearts. I find that music helps the flow of an operation. My gotos are reggae and classic rock.

I do primarily heart valve surgery, coronary bypass grafting, aortic aneurysm repair, and adult congenital surgery. I specialize in minimally invasive valve surgery, and at this point I do more miniaortic valves — through a 1.5–2-inch incision — than anyone else in New England. My job is essentially to fix anything that’s wrong with the heart in the least invasive way, so that patients can recover and return to their normal life as quickly as possible.

When doing a minimally invasive aortic valve surgery, a small skin incision is made over what I need to see. I then divide the upper portion of the breastbone down to the third intercostal space, or space between the ribs, so that the upper portion of the breastbone moves out of the way and reveals the heart structures beneath. The cannulas, or tubes, that allow us to connect to the heart-lung machine are then placed into the heart. The heart-lung bypass machine, which is essentially a pump and an oxygenator, allows us to bypass the patient’s heart and lungs so that we can fully empty and stop the heart, allowing us to directly operate on it.

During a mini-aortic valve replacement, we open up the aorta and examine the diseased aortic valve. In patients with aortic stenosis, the valves are often diseased with

abnormally thickened and calcified rocklike tissue that leaves only a small opening where there should be a large one. We cut out the diseased valve and surrounding diseased tissue, clear out the calcium and other debris, and then carefully vacuum and wash the area to make sure there’s nothing left that can embolize and cause strokes or other organ damage. We then place 12–15 sutures that secure the new artificial valve into position. A majority of the valves are “bioprosthetic.” These are composed of natural tissue harvested from the pericardial sac that surrounds the heart of special cows. This tissue is hand sewn to a titanium frame by highly skilled seamstresses. Once the new valve is placed, we separate the patient from the heart-lung machine, remove the cannulas, and close the chest. A minimally invasive aortic valve replacement such as this typically takes 2–2.5 hours.

I have a high-definition, 4K headlight camera, as well as a second camera in one of the overhead operating room lights. This allows us to record every operation for teaching and research, and also allows everyone in the room — the entire 8- to

9-person surgical team and any residents and students — to be fully engaged in the procedure. I wear magnifying “loops” (4.5 magnification lenses) to improve visualization — something that is essential when sewing with sutures that are often thinner than a human hair.

I really enjoy talking to patients. Initially when I get a call to see a new patient who needs heart surgery, it feels as if I’m being given an additional volume of work that I have to do before the day’s over. But the moment I walk into the room and see the patient — the moment our eyes meet — any feeling of work falls away, and I simply want to help them. They become part of my family. I do 300–350 open-heart surgeries per year, and I’ve been at my job for 25 years now, so that’s approximately 10,000 cases so far.

Helm was part of the team that saved David Letterman’s life when the comedian needed urgent quintuple bypass surgery in 2000. Helm and the other members of the surgical team were later invited to appear on the Late Show

A Gentle Touch

Angela Chongris ’98 is the face patients see before they’re wheeled into surgery with Bob Helm ’85. She’s a same-day care nurse who gets patients ready for the operating room. Helm relies on Chongris to check patients’ medical history and ensure they’ve taken the pre-op steps so the staff can proceed with surgery safely. Also, because Chongris is the one who’s called when there’s a tricky IV that others can’t get in, Helm has tapped her expertise for a vascular catheter care research project he’s been working on to decrease complications. Like Helm, Chongris’ eye-hand coordination (she was a lacrosse and hockey player at Colgate) is a skill she uses in her job daily.

When I graduated from Colgate, I worked there as an associate director of the annual fund. I was in charge of the development intern program, and I had a lot of fun working with those students. While living in Hamilton, I joined the Southern Madison County Volunteer Ambulance Corps. A friend knew that I had driven dump trucks and plow trucks for my family. He said, “You think you could drive an ambulance?” And I said, “Oh, yeah.”

I missed my family and wanted to be closer to home, so I moved to New Hampshire and took an EMT class and really liked it. I said, “I want to be an ER nurse.” After nursing school, I worked in the ER for many years and then transitioned to surgical services.

I find that the healthier patients tend to be more nervous for surgery because they haven’t spent a lot of time in the hospital. A lot of patients come in scared. One of the

things I love the most about my job is that we have the ability to instill confidence in our patients and, to distract them, we get them talking about their kids, their grandkids, or their dogs. By the time they’re rolling off into the OR, they’re looking me in the eyes and saying, “I don’t know how you did it, but thank you because I feel so much more relaxed.”

Sometimes patients can be a little grumpy. By the end, they’re laughing with you and smiling, and those are the ones who are quite rewarding because I know I’ve turned them around.

I have always been a people person. I grew up at a restaurant; in our family, customer service was part of normal talk at our house growing up. They teach you a lot about touch in nursing school and how that alone can be a source of comfort for patients. I’ll put my hand on somebody’s foot, and I can see their shoulders drop. You can tell who needs a little tap or a little squeeze of the toe or foot that says, “Hey, everything’s going to be OK.”

WHOLE-PERSON HEALING

By Sarah C. Baldwin

Whether it’s our growing dissatisfaction with the U.S. health care system, our increased openness to non-Western practices, or a little bit of both, one thing is true: More and more Americans are looking beyond conventional Western medicine to heal what ails us. According to the National Institutes of Health, it’s estimated that more than one-third of adults in this country use some form of what’s known as alternative or complementary medicine — think yoga, acupuncture, naturopathy, qigong — and three-quarters say they’ve tried such an approach at least once. For a small number of practitioners, the benefits of a particular modality can be so persuasive they decide to make it their life’s work. These five alumni have made such a professional pivot. Having embraced and then mastered a nonmainstream healing practice, they are now deploying their skills and knowledge to treat a wide range of ills, from allergies to anxiety. While they work in different modes, they all have one thing in common: a passion for making people feel better.

POSITIVE ENERGY

JoAnn Inserra ’82 Duncan, MS, Reiki master teacher

In the 1990s, JoAnn Inserra ’82 Duncan had a busy career as a genetic counselor in a Connecticut hospital. She also had a newborn son with colic, allergies, and asthma. Rather than follow the pediatrician’s recommendation to put the infant on daily steroids, Inserra, who was nursing, sought the help of a naturopath and eliminated certain foods from her diet. Her baby’s symptoms improved within days.

Inserra’s second son was also born with severe sensitivities and asthma. One day, she invited her Episcopal priest, who was also a Reiki master, to practice on him. Reiki is an

Inserra balances her client’s chakras.

Bob Handelman

energy-based method that brings about deep relaxation. “It didn’t cure his asthma,” she says, “but it stopped the asthma attack in its tracks.” When the priest practiced on Inserra, her own stress level dropped.

Soon Inserra was studying Reiki so she could practice it herself. By 2000 she had reached the third and highest level of certification, that of master teacher, and began treating clients in her home. In 2014 she opened Turning Point Healing Arts & Education Center, where she teaches Reiki and offers different forms of energy healing, treating people going through cancer, back pain, Lyme disease, and even grief.

She also worked with doctors, nurses, and social workers at Norwalk Hospital to establish a Reiki program there and remains committed to helping Reiki be part of any integrative medicine practice.

Inserra doesn’t see her work as being antithetical to traditional medical care. To her clients undergoing surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation for cancer, she says, Let’s work together to keep filling you with positive energy while you’re going through treatments. If you don’t get depleted, if I can help you be less fearful and anxious; it will help your body heal.

“I’m a unique Reiki master teacher because I walk the line between Western and Eastern medicine,” says Inserra, who majored in biology at Colgate and went on to earn a master’s in human genetics. “I believe there’s a place for both. We should be working together more because the goal is to help people heal.”

More on this ancient practice with Indian roots and a Japanese name:

“Think of the positive energy that’s out there in the universe. Reiki, which means ‘spiritually guided life force energy,’ is a way to harness it.”

Left: The peacock feather is the symbol of Turning Point Healing Arts because it symbolizes birth, rebirth, resurrection, wise vision, watchfulness, and wisdom.

Below: Inserra heals the seventh crown chakra — the most spiritual of all the chakras — where our divine essence is housed.

“Reiki primarily works on the chakras, or energy centers. There are seven chakras up the midline of the body. Each one brings energy to different parts of the body and helps with different physical, mental, or emotional issues.”

“If there’s stagnant or blocked energy in the body, the goal of the Reiki session is to release it, to get the energy moving in harmony and balance so that the person receiving Reiki is able to heal their own body, mind, and spirit.”

“The session entails a laying on of hands. There’s no massage. There’s no manipulation. I’m just resting my hands on, or above, the person’s fully clothed body. Most people get very relaxed during the session and feel warmth, tingling, or vibration. I’m in their energy field, so in that hour that they’re on the table, it’s like we’re connected spirit to spirit.”

Bob Handelman

THE JOY OF CLEAN COOKING

Evey Schweig ’82, health coach and anti-inflammatory specialist

Evey Schweig ’82 always considered herself healthy. She swam, practiced yoga, and worked out. She ate well, too — or so she thought. In her 40s, hip pain landed her on the table of a chiropractor, who told her, “I can adjust you over and over again, but if you don’t change the way you eat, it’s not going to stick.” The practitioner introduced her to the concept of an anti-inflammatory diet. That, Schweig says, was her light-bulb moment.

Cutting out her inflammation triggers (gluten and dairy), eschewing processed and sugary foods, and radically upping her fruit and vegetable intake eliminated her hip pain. Not only that, but it “basically slowed down the aging process,” she says: It improved her skin, left her feeling less bloated, and gave her the energy to become active again.

That energy is palpable. For the past 10 years, the summa cum laude biology major has been eagerly sharing her expertise as a certified holistic health coach in a range of settings, from public speaking to private clients, from her Facebook groups to her blog, from health retreats to the nearly 150 videos on her YouTube channel, Cooking with Evey.

Here Schweig serves up some healthy info:

“Chronic inflammation is at the root of so much illness in the body. Inflammation is the body’s way of healing itself, but if something goes askew, it doesn’t turn off. Chronic inflammation is insidious because it can have such a slow progression that we don’t even realize it’s occurring. By that point, the damage is done. It accelerates the aging process.”

“Rest and digest, not fight or flight. It’s not just what you eat, it’s how you eat it. I

encourage mindful eating. If your body’s not prepared to take in the nutrients, you could be eating the healthiest diet but not getting the full benefit of it. Focus, pay attention, and tell your body, Stop, I don’t need to run. I need to focus on eating right now.”

“This year I launched my Joint Pain Protocol. It’s a self-guided, online program geared toward active women suffering from joint pain and fatigue who want to relieve their symptoms naturally, without relying on more medication, and get back to living their best lives. Each member goes through the 12 modules on her own, but the program also features weekly group coaching sessions via Zoom, so members can encourage each other and share their challenges and insights to keep them moving forward. If a hill seems insurmountable, you might not even try to climb it. But when that slope becomes a bunch of small steps, you arrive at the top without even realizing you were taking the journey.”

I ENCOURAGE MINDFUL EATING.

Jorge Garzon

FOOD CULTURE CRITIC

Liz Brown ’95 Morgan, MA, FNTP, RWP, JD, functional nutritionist and food culture consultant

For Liz Brown ’95 Morgan, it’s always been about food and the planet.

As an anthropology major at Colgate, she was fascinated by what ancient cultures ate. As an attorney, she enforced environmental policies for the state of Ohio. As an ecoentrepreneur, she created a green online shopping site.

Along the way, Morgan says, she developed an awareness of just how toxic and overprocessed our mainstream “food culture” is. She also felt called to teach others about good nutrition and health — Earth’s, as well as their own. So she set out to become certified in functional nutrition, learning how systems in the body work, what causes them to go wrong, and how to adjust one’s diet to avoid foods that trigger adverse reactions.

“Functional medicine takes up where mainstream medicine leaves off,” she says.

Further study in restorative health equipped her to offer testing in blood chemistry, food sensitivity, digestion, autoimmune conditions, and more.

In the process of helping others, Morgan became her own patient, making changes to her diet and lifestyle. “I used to have bad ankle joints and couldn’t hike. I can go backpacking now,” she says. “I turned 50 last year, and my memory is way better than ever.”

Today Morgan offers a step-by-step, food-based, health-improvement program to private clients through her tele-wellness business, People + Planet Nutrition. She also consults with organizations to help their members become aware of — and say “no” to — America’s noxious food system, and has taught local high school students to recognize the physical symptoms of poor nutrition. As the new executive director of the Buena Vista Chamber of Commerce in Colorado, she hopes to raise “food culture awareness” among her colleagues and local businesses.

“I don’t think a proper food culture should be one that we have to battle just to eat real food and be healthy,” she says. “I believe in transforming the food culture into one that is delicious, wholesome, and deeply healing for people and planet.”

Here are five things Morgan wants you to think about when you think about food.

1. Learn your body’s language. “People don’t know what a well-functioning body feels like. Understand the language your body speaks to you in — the language of symptoms. Figure out what your body’s trying to tell you.”

2. Decadence, not deprivation. “People think to be healthy or to save the planet you have to deprive yourself. It’s just the opposite. To be healthy, you have to eat the wonderful, nourishing food that you’re meant to eat and that you’re going to love. Food that actually makes you feel good. That’s decadence.”

3. Structure, not willpower. “People think they have to be in battle with their body, with their food. When you build structures into your life — for example, preparing your breakfasts for the week in advance on Sunday night — eating well becomes easy and fun.”

4. Clean house. “Upgrade your bath and body products. There are now so many high-tech, natural products that are nontoxic, that aren’t putting poison on your skin. Same goes for homecleaning products.”

5. Find your food flow. “My clients have very different health concerns — digestion, hives, blood sugar issues, chronic pain, insomnia. I created Nourish + Flow, a step-by-step program to teach people how their body works, why it’s breaking down, and what they can do about it — from food and lifestyle upgrades to precision clinical support. It’s a framework to help them reset their health.”

IN THE PROCESS OF HELPING OTHERS, MORGAN BECAME HER OWN PATIENT.

HANDY TOOLS

Christine Pan ’96, EdM, DC, chiropractic physician and acupuncturist

The daughter of a nurse and an OB-GYN, Dr. Christine Pan ’96 assumed she’d head to medical school after Colgate. Instead, to her bachelor’s degree in psychology she added a master of education in school counseling and worked for five years as a middle school counselor. She enjoyed helping the kids, Pan says, “but I always felt there was a piece missing. I wanted to heal physically as well as mentally.”

Pan knew she had good hands — friends had complimented her on her massages for years — and thought chiropractic medicine might be a good fit. When she enrolled in a doctor of chiropractic program, “that first day of classes, I was like, ‘This is it. This is where I’m supposed to be,’” she recalls. In addition to earning a DC, she became certified in acupuncture and clinical nutrition.

Today Pan offers chiropractic, acupuncture, and soft-tissue manipulation

in a three-person practice in Chicago that takes a comprehensive, primary-care approach to health. “We’re a one-stop shop treating musculoskeletal conditions through chiropractic and acupuncture,” she says, “but we also use functional medicine — blood testing, nutrition, supplements, and lifestyle.”

How do chiropractic medicine and acupuncture work?

Our joints are meant to move. The body’s very smart, and when a joint isn’t moving well, there’s another joint that’s compensating. This creates dysfunctional patterns in your muscles, joints, and nerves, which are all tied together. A chiropractic adjustment restores movement to the joint, so the muscle and nerves it’s connected to calm down. It’s like a reset button for the nervous system.

Acupuncture is based on the balance between the opposing principles of yin and yang, and uses the meridians, which are pathways for qi, or life force. Meridians correspond to different organs. When health

is out of balance, needles can help unblock energy in a given meridian so it can flow.

Both of these approaches are designed to help the body regain its innate ability to heal itself.

Who’s your clientele?

We treat anyone, from infants to the elderly. I work a lot with children. We also focus on women’s health, including helping them get pregnant, then following them through their pregnancy and the postpartum period. This is where acupuncture is a nice adjunct, because you can use it for joint and muscle pain, stress, and sleep, but also for things like fertility assistance and labor induction. When we assist our patients with getting pregnant, we work hand in hand with their allopathic doctors. They might be getting IVF or doing another procedure, and we can support that through acupuncture.

How would you describe the vibe of your practice?

We always want people to feel heard, and we want their experience to feel nurturing. So many times I’ve heard people say, “I hate going to the doctor” or “Hospitals creep me out,” whereas my patients say, “I couldn’t wait to come and get my treatment today!” That’s because they come onto our tables and leave feeling better.

We’re all pretty upbeat. When you bring positivity to your patients, that is also a healing factor.

What’s the coolest thing about your work?

I love that I can heal with my hands. They’re tools that are right at my disposal. Recently my family was hiking in the Smoky Mountains, and my daughter came down wrong on her foot. I worked on it for 15 minutes, and she was off and running. My other daughter was coming down with a sinus infection, so I did acupuncture on her. Her headache went away and she was able to spend the day hiking with us. It’s very empowering to have tools right here that are both effective and conservative.

What’s the most satisfying part of your work?

What always calls to me is releasing myofascial adhesions to get someone out of pain. When a patient who says they’ve been to other doctors lands on my table and I’m able to relieve them of their pain, there’s nothing more satisfying. Of course, if I have to refer out, I do. But between chiropractic, acupuncture, and functional medicine, I don’t think there’s any person I can’t help in some way.

Susan Seubert

‘LIKE CURES LIKE’

Douglas Brown ’79, CCH, FNP, RSHom(NA), homeopath

Douglas Brown ’79 has been practicing homeopathic medicine in Portland, Ore., for almost a quarter of a century. But he started his health care career in a very different place: as a Yale-trained family nurse practitioner.

“At first, I was thrilled to be able to help people with the antibiotics and other medications I was authorized to prescribe,” Brown says. After a decade or so, however, he became disillusioned. “I was prescribing medications, which caused side effects, which then required me to add more medications.” He felt especially stymied, he says, in his efforts to free people from chronic disease and chronic suffering. He began to explore other, less traditional healing methods, such as hypnotherapy.

Around that time, Brown’s toddler developed a severe ear infection. One week and two different antibiotics later, the boy was no better. A friend encouraged Brown to take him to a homeopath. Skeptical, Brown nevertheless administered the remedy the homeopath prescribed: belladonna, or deadly nightshade, prepared in such a way that any toxic properties of the plant were eliminated. “It was kind of a miracle,” he says. “My son got better overnight.”

What’s more, he notes, in his 10 years as a nurse, he had treated “hundreds, if not thousands, of kids with ear infections, and when they came back two weeks later, there was always some fluid behind the eardrums.” When Brown examined his son’s ears three days after the symptoms disappeared, they were completely clear.

Homeopathy is based on the theory that “like cures like” — in other words, a substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person can be used (in highly diluted form) to treat a person whose illness is causing those same symptoms. It is also based on the belief that the body can heal itself: “It supports healing from the inside out,” says Brown.

I’M ALWAYS TREATING THE WHOLE PERSON.

But what Brown found most compelling about homeopathy was that “it acknowledges that the mind and the body are two aspects of the same experience. Each individual’s experience of their illness has many particularities, which have to do with their social, financial, and relationship difficulties, along with their spiritual approach to their own life.” Before enrolling in homeopathic school, he audited a class in which some case study videos amazed him: Not only were patients’ chief complaints cured, “they felt healed on a whole different level, beyond whatever the chief complaint was. They felt more of themselves. That interested me.”

Whatever Brown is called on to treat — fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, diabetes, obesity, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder — he first asks his patients a multitude of questions, not just about their condition but about their experience of it. “I’m always treating the whole person,” he says.

For this approach, Brown credits some

role models at Colgate (all deceased since his four years on the Hill): Coleman Brown, professor of philosophy and religion and University chaplain; John Carter, professor of philosophy and religion and director of Chapel House; and Huntington “Hunt” Terrell ’46, professor of philosophy.

“These faculty opened my eyes to the depth of integrity of each human being, to the fact that each human being has a life of the soul. Homeopathy recognizes the depth of the soul and that its suffering may impact health — it’s built into the model. That’s what makes it a better fit for who I am.”

Weaving Stronger Safety Nets

To improve mental health care, these alumni are strengthening support systems for vulnerable populations.

BY Katie Neith

It’s estimated that more than one in five American adults live with a mental illness. The COVID-19 pandemic put an additional strain on our nation’s psyche, already heavy under the weight of gun violence, economic distress, the opioid crisis, and much more.

While medications for depressive disorders and antipsychotics have improved in the past few decades and new treatment models show promise, much of mental health care has been slow to progress. Stigma, lack of resources, and a tradition of reactive — instead of proactive — approaches to care are just some of the reasons that growth in the field has been stymied.

But many mental health professionals, including generations of Colgate alumni, are hoping to build better bridges to education, comprehensive care, and recovery resources through innovative programs and partnerships.

Integrating Care

When Peter Brown ’63 first started eyeing retirement, he knew exactly what would come next: He wanted to create an organization that would improve the quality of behavioral health care. So, with the help of Alden “Joe” Doolittle ’67, an executive in health care management, Brown did just that, establishing the Institute for

Behavioral Healthcare Improvement (IBHI) in 2004.

Behavioral health is an umbrella term for investigating the effects of thought and emotions on behavior and includes mental health, but also factors like addiction and social disorders.

“I believe there are three major things that need to change about behavioral health care,” says Brown, who spent more than four decades working in New York state mental health departments and the legislature. “We need to measure our results when we implement new programs or treatment models and share the data, integrate general health care and behavioral health care, and develop prevention efforts that identify mental health issues early on and effectively work to stop the devolution of the diseases to the point where people become incapacitated.”

As executive director of IBHI, Brown advocates for integrating mental health services into the overall health care system and working to reach people before they are in crisis, not just after. Doolittle was Brown’s co-director for six years and continues to serve as a senior adviser.

IBHI is modeled after the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), a private nonprofit dedicated to advancing and sustaining better outcomes in health through science-driven solutions. Brown was first introduced to IHI in the mid-1990s when he was serving as deputy commissioner for the New York State Office of Mental Health. After attending a program about the organization’s work, he left thinking that many of the core concepts — including a proactive, holistic, and strategic approach to integrating systems of care — could be valuable for behavioral health care, too.

IBHI’s first effort, and the one that Brown says has continued to be the most sought after, focused on improving the operation of emergency departments in the way they serve people with behavioral health problems.

“Many times, people with serious behavioral health issues are taken to emergency departments, and at least in the larger metropolitan areas of New York, we have comprehensive psychiatric emergency services available,” says Brown. “But in most places around the nation, the people who wind up trying to serve this group of people with emergency circumstances have relatively little training in serving that population.”

To address this issue, IBHI is set up as a national learning organization that seeks to connect health care experts, administrators, and criminal justice professionals both to each other and to evidence-based methodologies that can improve outcomes and quality of care.

“One of the big problems we have in this field is that we have built up such a large organization of care that there’s a lot of inertia to the system; we like to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them,” says Brown. “We need to collect data and share it across the world so that we can understand how we can make a better product.”

IBHI has also developed programs, conferences, and webinars on improving the relationship between criminal justice and behavioral health to further those connections, as well as small-group programs for senior

leaders in the mental health and health care fields to talk about concerns and potential solutions.

“We need to stop separating behavioral health from the rest of health care,” says Brown. “We have almost no prevention or mitigation methodologies that we implement. We let symptoms build up to the point that they become a huge problem, and then we rush in and try to solve it. Prevention is far more effective.”

Creating Spaces for Conversation

In 2012 Ellen Dalton ’74 lost her 24-year-old daughter, Nancy, to suicide. Dalton had spent her career administering mental and behavioral health programs for young people in Massachusetts, and while she knew that Nancy struggled, she says suicide is not something a parent ever thinks could happen in their family.

“Being in the field, I just couldn’t understand how she could slip through my fingers like that,” Dalton says. “I did a lot of soul searching to peel back the layers to understand more about suicide. What I realized, as I looked at suicidal behavior and thinking in young people, was that it was rampant.”

We need to stop separating behavioral health from the rest of health care.”

— Peter Brown ’63 “

Out of her grief, The NAN Project was born. Named after her daughter, the project aims to promote mental health awareness and suicide prevention programs for young people.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in children ages 10–14 and adults 25–34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For people ages 15–24, it is the third leading cause.

“The reason, I believe, is that we don’t talk about it,” says Dalton, who is now CEO of The NAN Project after retiring from work that focused on juvenile justice and behavioral health. “Nancy fit in very well and was able to mask her symptoms for many years. So, the goal when we started The NAN Project was to get the conversation going at a young age. The model we came up with was based on the idea that young people talking to students and sharing what they’ve been through is an impactful way of getting information across.”

The NAN Project launched in 2016 with a small staff that includes Dalton’s son, Jake, who serves as executive director. To get started, the team arranged focus groups — talking with young people who had struggled with mental health issues, along with their parents, educators, and other experts — to help inform building an organization to deliver education, prevention, and intervention strategies to school staff members, parents, and their children.

The program relies on a peer-to-peer model that utilizes teenagers and young adults who visit schools across Massachusetts to educate middle and high schoolers about mental health, help destigmatize it, and connect those seeking assistance to trusted adults as well as other peers who have experienced mental health struggles.

“We recruit young people who have had their own struggles,” says Dalton. “They work with us, go through an intensive four-day training, and then [get] a lot of coaching. We help them craft their story, which is about their struggles with mental illness and also about the turning points, the things that changed their trajectory to put them on a path to recovery. It is so courageous.

And the kids in the classroom, they’re hungry for this information.”

Peer mentors also work with clinicians to provide “social emotional learning circles” in school settings. Dalton says these groups bring students together who might need extra support to talk about different coping skills, relationships, managing stress, and other topics related to mental well-being.

The NAN Project is student focused, but the organization has also created professional development opportunities, mental health lesson plans, evidence-based training for school staff members, workshops for parents and caregivers, mental health and suicide prevention training for first responders, and outreach for young people in Massachusetts who want to learn how to help those around them struggling with suicidal thoughts.

each individual has their own team of psychiatrists, therapists, nurses, and supportive education specialists who work together cohesively to provide treatment and assistance. Peer specialists, like Nabi, are also an integral part of the team.

“We help people pick up after having suffered some setback and develop the skills of resilience,” he says. “We want to get them back on track, whether that’s in terms of a career, school, or just life in general.”

Nabi typically meets with participants in the clinic or on calls when they have recently been released from the hospital and are disoriented.

“I first make room to listen to what’s going on and help them make sense of it all,” he says. “Then, through worksheets, dialogue, and just connecting and repeatedly working with each other, we build a road map for recovery together.”

— Chris von Zuben ’92 “

I found, over time, that I wanted to focus on community mental health and underserved populations who, for a variety of reasons, are reluctant to access or can’t access appropriate care.”

“Over the years, I’ve seen the conversations about mental illness, about suicide, beginning to open up,” says Dalton. “Bottom line is that it should be something kids learn about at an early age. We need to make sure they can have the necessary conversations and know where to turn. The stigma is not going to go away. But it can’t stand in the way of someone getting the help they need — that can be deadly.”

Supporting Others as a Peer

The power of peer-to-peer support groups is one that resonates strongly with Aqil Un Nabi ’17. He’s a mental health specialist working with young adults who are experiencing early psychosis and coping with diagnoses of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. At Colgate, he majored in political science with a minor in film and media studies and enjoyed the challenge of a rich curriculum. But in the latter half of his senior year, a confluence of factors led to his first experience with psychosis — which is when someone’s thoughts and perceptions have been disrupted to a point of disconnection from reality.

“There were a lot of moving parts in terms of stressors, including the course load and leaving some of my friends at Colgate; I was kind of worked up about what was going to happen next and had a lot of anxiety about that,” says Nabi.

He was hospitalized, after which he was connected to resources at OnTrackNY, a mental health treatment program in New York State. It’s specifically for young people ages 16–30 who have recently started experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia or have had acute episodes of psychosis.

“Because of my political science experience and having learned skills as a communicator in therapy, I was able to explain what was going on with me,” Nabi recalls. “I could speak clearly about a lot of the cognitive distortions, the racing and intrusive thoughts that were going on.” After Nabi finished the program as a participant, he was referred for a position at OnTrackNY as a peer specialist.

Nabi recently celebrated three years of full-time employment at OnTrackNY in Washington Heights, New York City, where he is helping young people the same way others helped him when he first started his recovery journey.

OnTrackNY’s coordinated care system ensures that

Another aspect of his work is running group programs, including virtual social hours, personal growth workshops, and outings that might include a movie, a museum visit, or even playing a basketball game.

“These activities provide a collaborative space for them to learn life skills, but I also want to make it an environment where the process of getting better feels a bit more fun and connected,” says Nabi.

In 2023 Nabi was chosen to present about his experience as a participant in and a provider for OnTrackNY at the first Early Psychosis Care Conference sponsored by Missouri Institute of Mental Health. He hopes to have more opportunities for collaborations across the country and maybe even get into consulting one day. But for now, he appreciates the chance to connect with OnTrackNY program participants and form reciprocal relationships.

“The peer-to-peer model provides an intimate connection,” says Nabi. “Having another person as a guiding point who has gone through some of the same challenges but is now working in a capacity to help others thrive offers a positive marker that they can learn from. Just because you experienced mental health challenges, doesn’t mean it should stop or limit you from doing the things you want to do.”

A Holistic Continuum of Care

For people experiencing severe mental health disorders in nontraditional settings, the right support can be extremely hard to piece together. That’s why Chris von Zuben ’92, a clinical manager and licensed psychologist working with the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health & Intellectual disAbility Services, wants to enhance or establish mental health services for populations that include people reentering the community from prison or jail, those returning from time in a psychiatric hospital or substance abuse program, and those in nursing homes.

“Human behavior was always fascinating to me,” says von Zuben, who majored in psychology at Colgate. “I found, over time, that I wanted to focus on community mental health and underserved populations who, for a variety of reasons, are reluctant to access or can’t access appropriate care.”

After earning a master’s degree in psychological services from the University of Pennsylvania and a

doctorate in psychology from Temple University, von Zuben worked at WES Health System — a community mental health agency — for nearly 14 years. At WES, he fine-tuned his ability to assess individuals and families in order to identify psychiatric disorders and agree on goals as well as interventions to support their recoveries. He also helped develop specialized care services such as a Dialectical Behavior Therapy program for adults and established WES’ postdoctoral training program that helped graduate students become licensed psychologists in Pennsylvania.

In 2017 he joined the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health in a division that specializes in helping reduce justice involvement for individuals with behavioral health issues, be it severe mental illness and/or a substance use disorder, by offering holistic treatment and support programs.

One of the major programs that von Zuben has been involved in recently is establishing a continuum of care of services for people who are returning to the community — either from a state hospital, county jail, or prisons across the state — and have a severe mental illness like schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Many of these individuals don’t have a place to live and need structured support to return to the community after being in jail or a hospital for many months or years. In October 2022, the Christine Gibson Peer Support House opened as the last piece of the continuum of care puzzle in Philadelphia. It’s a shortterm housing or respite home where individuals can focus on getting reconnected to all the services and support they need.

“It’s all about social determinants of health — housing, employment, benefits, education, family, access to needed services — and making sure we’re getting those covered for people coming out of jail and other state facilities,” explains von Zuben. “The unique element is we wanted to utilize certified peer specialists to support the individuals in this house. This is a relatively new aspect for behavioral health services in Pennsylvania and across the nation.”

The peer specialists, similar to Nabi’s role at OnTrackNY, have the lived experience of recovering from severe mental illness or from substance use and, in some cases, the experience of having been incarcerated.

“It’s an excellent addition to an integrated approach to behavioral health: You have your psychiatrist, your therapist, a social worker, and now you have the certified peer specialist who offers living proof that you can recover and achieve your goals,” says von Zuben. “For people with severe mental illness and legal oversight who are often marginalized by society, peer specialists can offer a lot of hope.”

Von Zuben and his colleagues also help clients navigate complicated legal systems, serve as a bridge for people with brain injuries or dementia who fall in the gap between medical and behavioral health care, and are working to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion into their policies and programs so that people of all backgrounds and abilities have access to care and feel supported.

He’s also helped to build a program to infuse behavioral health services into nursing home care.

“If you qualify for nursing home care, you will get the skilled nursing you need, but then you’re also going to get treatment for, say, schizophrenia so that you can live in a more fully supportive environment,” says von Zuben. “You can get all your needs met under one roof.”

Brown, Dalton, Nabi, and von Zuben all face barriers to the positive changes they are trying to make through their hard work. Lack of funding, struggles with bureaucratic red tape, enduring stigma around behavioral and mental health issues, and burnout from the mental labor required of providers are just a sample of the many challenges. But von Zuben, like the others, sees hope not just in his work, but also promise on the horizon for the field as a whole.

He’s noticed four areas where he believes progress is underway. “There is a growing appreciation of the impact of a trauma in people’s lives and brain injury, so that’s very valuable,” he says. Von Zuben adds that he thinks there’s an increased understanding of racial disparities in the justice system and agencies that are trying to address them. And, he says, there’s a growing number of evidence-based practices that, through research, have demonstrated they can improve people’s well-being, including people with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Lastly, “We’re seeing good progress in terms of integrating behavioral health services and medical services to better serve people,” says von Zuben.

Endeavor

media

The Psychology of Kids’ TV

New Netflix show by Alexandra Cassel ’11 Schwartz tells viewers ‘every first deserves a second chance.’

Have you ever wished you could rewind and start over after making a mistake? If you’re one of five cute little animals in the new Netflix Kids series Wonderoos, you have that magic opportunity.

The show, an educational animated preschool series, tackles the “firsts” children experience — like having a bathroom accident at the park or feeling hyperactive at bedtime. Episodes also dive into more serious struggles, like the death of a loved one. “We wanted to reflect some common themes preschoolers (ages 2–5) were facing,” says showrunner Alexandra Cassel ’11 Schwartz, who developed the series. The show has an important aspect that makes it distinctive from other programs geared toward this audience: Every time a character experiences one of these firsts, the show incorporates a “What to do?” moment,

allowing the character a do-over. Then, one of the characters walks through the reasons why the second choice produced a more positive outcome.

At its root, the show demonstrates a growth mindset — the idea that hardships happen, and we can learn from them — when addressing each challenge.

Wonderoos was created with guidance from a childhood psychology consultant, and Schwartz herself has a background in the field. She studied psychology with an emphasis on child development at Colgate, and she holds a master’s in developmental psychology from Teachers College of Columbia University. Each episode of the show is carefully planned to ensure the right messages are being given to children through the characters’ actions. Educational shows for preschoolers have become popularized in recent years, so she and her

team have a responsibility to make sure they get it right. “In the wake of the pandemic, children’s mental health has become a priority,” Schwartz says.

Educational TV can also be a way of exposing a child to different people and circumstances when they have a small social bubble, an idea that is especially relevant to children who were born during the COVID-19 pandemic, Schwartz says. Wonderoos introduces audiences to five animals that have varying characteristics, such as anxiety, ADHD, and a physical difference. Schwartz and her team hope that by seeing these animals interact, viewers will learn about their conditions, normalize them, and learn helpful coping techniques.

Before creating Wonderoos, Schwartz spent 10 years writing and producing the Emmy Award–winning PBS Kids series Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. When Netflix approached her with the idea of creating a new animated series, she says, she was excited to bring the skills she learned on Daniel Tiger to the streaming platform. Also, coming from a high-profile show like Daniel Tiger (from the makers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood) to Wonderoos provided her with a lot of leeway to make her own decisions about content, says Schwartz, who was a film and media studies minor.

Through trial and error, the characters on Wonderoos show the viewer how to turn a negative situation into a positive one in each 12-minute episode. Schwartz developed every aspect of those characters, from their colors to their personalities. She and a story editor wrote the majority of the 40-episode series, as well as worked with directors, musicians, and other creatives involved in the making of the show in order to ensure it stayed cohesive. Altogether, Schwartz says, she’s proud to have developed a show that will psychologically help the next generation.

“I was raised as somewhat of a perfectionist, and I think I could’ve benefited from a show like this.”

— Rebecca Docter

Schwartz credits psychology professor

Carrie Keating with planting the seed to pursue a career in children’s entertainment.

Lauren Makenna

Ditch the Clutter

With her organization business, Jen Becker ’01 Denney is giving clients a stress-free living experience.

From organizing consultant

Marie Kondo to Netflix’s Get Organized with The Home Edit, the popularity of home organization in recent years has led to a trend in aesthetic decluttering. That, coupled with the need for multifunctional spaces — spurred by an increase of people working from home — has caused a boom in home organization.

But the average person may have a difficult time knowing where to start. That’s where Jen Becker ’01 Denney comes in. Through her business, A Created Home, she helps clients make sense of the mess in their Annapolis, Md., residences.

A Created Home started as an extension of Denney’s real estate business. She’d previously worked as an event organizer (including one of President Obama’s inaugural balls), so she would stage clients’ homes when she was selling them. After their homes sold, Denney’s real estate clients often wanted her to design and organize their new homes — but she couldn’t, because agents are only allowed to receive funds through their broker, according to Maryland law. “The process of buying and selling a house is a really emotional time, and you create a bond with your clients,” Denney says. “I hated saying no.”

When the market hit a short downturn in 2022 and Denney had fewer clients, she saw her chance: build a separate business aimed at home organization and staging. A Created Home LLC was born.

With her business partner, Krista McNamara, Denney aims to adjust clients’ living spaces in a way that ensures both longevity as well as visual appeal. A space needs to be organized in an intuitive way for the client, so it doesn’t devolve into a mess once Denney’s team leaves. And it’s not all clear plastic bins; when she visits each client for a consultation, Denney evaluates their decorating style and matches the organizational tools to their taste.

What a client needs right now — no matter their life stage — is of utmost importance. For example, Denney’s baby boomer clients have often taken the ethos from their Great

Depression parents of keeping everything because it might be needed one day. They also fell prey to the single-use appliance craze that began in the 1980s, so their homes are often cluttered and they now crave a more minimalist lifestyle as they enter their retirement era. “For the first time in my life, I want to feel like I know where things are and that they have a purpose,” one client requested.

Denney and her team help clients decide what to give away, and, most importantly, bring the items to a donation center that same day, so the clutter doesn’t just pile back up. “A lot of people have this hang-up as to ‘where is it going next?’ and that’s something we can solve for them,” she says.

On the flipside, Denney has many millennial clients looking to organize their children’s play areas. In this situation, she sets up a system that is easily accessible to the child so they, too, can learn the habits of organization. For a toddler, she might

create a child-height cabinet with pictures of each drawer’s contents so that the child understands where their toys go and can help at cleanup time. She also suggests to parents that toys come out on a rotating basis, with the rest in storage, to decrease clutter and increase stimulation for the child when new toys are added to the mix.

Stress often comes hand-in-hand with organization, and Denney says that’s because clients sometimes have underlying issues causing them to procrastinate on a project. Her biggest tip: Start in the area of your home that’s bothering you the most, and work with your home organizer to get to the root of the problem. “If your closet is stressing you out, there’s a reason why your closet’s stressing you out,” Denney suggests.

Decluttering and organizing your home can make life less stressful and more fun, she says. That should be the ultimate goal.

— Rebecca Docter

Entrepreneurship

Making Waves

Nick Kern ’94 starts Hawaii’s first all-electric charter company.

The sight that greets tourists sailing aboard the Dolce Vita is picture-perfect Hawaii: endless blue skies, the verdant slopes of Mauna Kea volcano, schools of rainbowhued fish, and sea turtles gliding beneath crystal waters. But when the 34-foot catamaran pulls out of its slip in Kawaihae Harbor on Hawaii’s Big Island and sets sail into the National Marine Whale Sanctuary of the Kohala Coast, most passengers quickly realize something is different. The boat is moving, but there is no rumble of an engine. The only sound is the soft splash of waves against the hull. It feels like magic, but the owner of the Dolce Vita, Nick Kern ’94, is no magician. He’s the founder of Kohala Blue Sail Hawaii, the first all-electric chartered sailing service in the Hawaiian Islands. Chartered sailing, which offers passengers a chance to hire a sailboat for sightseeing, is a big business in Hawaii. According to the state’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, each year the islands receive more than 9 million tourists who spend

nearly $2 billion on recreational activities, which includes sailing excursions offered by the dozens of charter companies on the islands. Kern offers customers something unique: the only sailing charter that doesn’t pollute the pristine Hawaiian environment with diesel fumes and oil leaks from their onboard engines.

Kern’s journey to founding the business was — like so much of his life — unexpected. After graduating from Colgate with degrees in English literature and economics, Kern relocated to Montana to work as a bartender and live what he calls a “ski bum” life. But after six years, he felt a pull toward entrepreneurship.

Kern and his wife bought a struggling property that they rehabilitated into an internationally renowned destination called Potosi Hot Springs Resort, which was featured on networks like ESPN and the Outdoor Channel. “It was an incredible amount of work, and my wife and I almost killed ourselves with exhaustion,” Kern says. “But we managed to make it work.” The two sold the resort in 2007 to focus on family,

and it was on a vacation to Baja, Mexico, that Kern’s love for sailing blossomed.

“I met a guy down there, a crazy Englishman, who taught us how to sail and would invite us out to spend the nights on his boat,” Kern says.

After 20 years in Montana, Kern and his family were ready for a change of scenery — and warmer weather. In 2014 they moved to Hawaii, where Kern bought a sailboat to indulge his new maritime hobby. In 2019, when one of the few commercial slips at the Kawaihae Harbor came up for sale, he saw an opportunity to put his entrepreneurial background in the hospitality sector to use. He purchased the slip, got his captain’s license, and traded up for a larger sailboat with the vision of launching a chartered sailing business. He founded Kohala Blue Sail Hawaii in early 2020, but it was tough to focus on the business amid the turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, that November, his wife passed away from cancer.

After experiencing that tragedy, Kern threw himself into the business with renewed energy. It helped take his mind off things and gave him a sense of purpose. During this time, he met his business partner and now girlfriend, Shaun Barnes, who helped him run the charter while Kern and his children collected themselves. Things were humming along for Kohala Blue — until the Dolce Vita’s diesel engine failed in 2022 and brought the business to a halt.

Faced with the decision of whether to replace it with another diesel engine or to take the boat in a new direction, Kern and Barnes spotted an opportunity: They decided to use the newest technology and overhaul the boat to be all electric and off the grid. During the next few months, they worked with local electricians to install two electric motors (one on each hull) and a battery pack charged by solar panels and small wind turbines. The result was the first — and only — electric charter in the Hawaiian Islands.

“All these diesel engines are dripping oil into the ocean and there are lots of fumes; and dolphins and whales suffer dramatically from the noise of diesel engines,” says Kern. “We eliminated all of that.”

Today, Kern and his family live in Colorado, where he moved to be closer to his mother. They return to Hawaii a few times per year to visit. Barnes handles the day-today operations of running Kohala Blue while Kern helps with marketing and business planning. Although Kern often misses the Big Island, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever return full time. But he’s proud to know that he was able to leave the island a bit better than he found it.

— Daniel Oberhaus

Bring Her Kitchen Into Your Kitchen

Heather Kroll ’93 Bailey makes healthy eating easier.

or Heather Kroll ’93 Bailey, the light-bulb moment in her career came when she learned that her daughters’ generation may have a shorter life expectancy than her own. A central cause? Staples of modern diets such as sugary drinks and processed meats. The realization motivated Bailey — who has been a chef since graduating from Colgate — to go back to school to study nutrition. She put that knowledge to work by founding The Optimal Kitchen in 2007, where she promotes a plant-based diet through classes, recipes, nutritional consulting, and the sale of her own healthy prepared foods.

Bailey has loved cooking since her childhood in Manhattan, when she took classes in Chinese and Italian cuisines. Working as a chef in restaurants on the Caribbean island of Vieques, Puerto Rico,

for six years after college taught her to focus on using the ingredients that are on hand. “We received produce once a week — it was flown over on a plane or came on a boat,” she recalls. “You had to work with what was available.”

Today, she has a flourishing garden at her home in East Orleans, Cape Cod, where she grows several kinds of fruits and vegetables, including varieties of squash, cabbage, and peas, as well as 10 different types of herbs. Using that produce in her dishes for The Optimal Kitchen has offset her food costs by 40–50%, she says.

Each week, Bailey sells her muffins, salads, soups, and other foods at local shops and the Orleans Farmers’ Market. She also offers a subscription to her communitysupported agriculture (CSA) meal plan to provide families with the ability to have healthy prepared foods at hand. “What many people want is to not have to do the cooking themselves,” she says.

The Optimal Kitchen offers customers a weekly pickup that typically includes frozen soups, vegetable grain bowls, dips, and a sweet treat. Bailey is known for her Thai noodle salad and her sugar-free and grain-free muffins, which are sweetened with fruits or vegetables. Her most popular muffin flavors are carrot ginger and banana coconut. During the pandemic, the population of Cape Cod

exploded, providing a boost to her business.

To further support her community, Bailey gives nutrition talks at the local library and offers classes on how to prepare healthy meals with local ingredients. She also discusses how our eating habits affect the environment. “I’m trying to make people understand the connection between what’s good for your body and what’s good for the planet,” she says. “Plants have far less of an impact on our carbon system than animal products.”

All the nutritional recommendations out there can seem overwhelming, Bailey acknowledges, but she sums up her best advice this way: “Stop focusing on what you shouldn’t eat and focus on what are the best things you should be eating. Fill your plate with vegetables, and try to incorporate a vegetable you’ve never eaten before each week, such as Swiss chard or daikon radish. The more vegetables you eat and the more diversity of vegetables you eat, the healthier you will be.”

— Jennifer Altmann

Bailey is the author of two cookbooks: The Flavors of Summer: A Guide to Everyday Eating from The Optimal Kitchen and Cool Weather Favorites: A Guide to Everyday Eating from The Optimal Kitchen.

I’m trying to make people understand the connection between what’s good for your body and what’s good for the planet.

Julia Cumes

SALMAGUNDI

She Saved the Day

James C. Colgate’s wife, Hope Hubbell Conkling, was a philanthropist who pitched in at a crucial time.

In Special Collections and University Archives, there is sparse information about James C. Colgate’s wife, Hope Hubbell Conkling. But a collection of letters indicates that she played an instrumental role in helping to start the University’s first infirmary — at a critical time.

The building project was first discussed in 1911 at a Board of Trustees meeting, according to Special Collections Librarian Xena Becker. After the board decided to purchase the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house as a location for the project, the building was reconstructed over the next two years.

“Conkling provided funding to renovate the purchased fraternity house into a functioning infirmary, per two letters from President [Elmer Burritt] Bryan [to James C. Colgate] from late 1911 and early 1912,” Becker says.

By 1913, Colgate’s first infirmary was fully equipped. So by the time the Spanish flu hit campus in October 1918, it was designated as an established medical facility.

Bryan wrote to James C. Colgate in the fall of 1918 to express his gratitude to Conkling: “I wish that you would say to Mrs. Colgate that the infirmary saved the day. We were able to take the best of care of our sick boys.”

In the same letter, Bryan reported that the Spanish flu infected 70 students, with one death in the community. Altogether, there was a variety of pandemic-associated disturbances that year — Colgate opened late and the football season was canceled. Nevertheless, the infirmary was there to help restore some normalcy.

“She [Conkling] was clearly essential to the infirmary becoming and remaining an operational unit on campus through at least 1919,” offers Becker.

— Tate Fonda ’25

collections & university archives

“Few hospitals ever got a better start in life than did Community Memorial Hospital last Friday evening, when hundreds of residents lined the streets of Hamilton. The slogan, which was adopted to symbolize the greatest fundraising effort in the history of this section — ‘Let’s All Join Hands to Build Community Memorial Hospital’ — was never more packed with meaning.”

— the Mid-York Weekly, June 15, 1950

The Beginnings of Community Memorial Hospital

In 1947 a survey conducted by the New York State Department of Health revealed that Madison County was lacking hospital beds. Hamilton heard the call — just four years later, in a joint Colgate-village effort, Community Memorial Hospital would open for operation.

In every respect, the hospital was a community effort — a year of fundraising preceded the hospital’s opening in January 1952. Local funds ranged in source and scale, from sizable household contributions to small carnivals held by local young people. During their commencement, the Colgate Class of 1949 matched these local funds to provide a $125,000 donation, an equivalent purchasing power of $2,892,500 today.

“This past spring, residents of this section had a dream, a dream of a hospital,” read an article in the Mid-York Weekly on Jan. 12, 1950. “They went to work on that dream and raised $125,000 that it might come true.”

Prior to the hospital’s opening, a nine-man board of directors, including three members designated by Colgate’s trustees, was instated. The board oversaw business affairs relating to incorporation and preparation of final architect’s plans, which were brought to life following the groundbreaking ceremony in June 1950.

Construction continued through January 1952, when on the first day of the new year, Community Memorial Hospital was officially opened. The 50-bed facility would feature local emergency care and surgery services previously sought in distant communities.

“The realization of a modern hospital to serve the area and the University is truly a striking example of the effectiveness of community enterprise and cooperation,” the Mid-York Weekly reported on Nov. 22, 1951. “It is a monumental project, which has served to unify and stimulate the area as nothing has ever done before.”

— Tate Fonda ’25

An open house allowed more than 2,000 people to tour the new hospital in November 1951 (inset photo above).

Fight fires in western Idaho

Plant an apple tree in Clifford Gallery p.16

Deliver a baby in rural Alaska p.30

Sail Hawaii on an electric boat p.50

Film the wilderness in Borneo p.28

Study cancer biology p.17

Meditate in Chapel House p.14

Dine on a bug banquet p.1

Organize your mess

Be the healing hands of the Phillies p.68

Harness positive energy from the universe p.36

Treat high-risk patients in Africa p.84

Develop a Netflix show for preschoolers p.48