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$1 Million Gift for Conservation Research
Nothing More Important
A $1 million gift from the Midgley Foundation establishes a permanent fund to support summer research projects focused on environmental conservation.
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BY ANDREW WICKENDEN ’09
Student scholars and faculty mentors collaborating on summer research: it’s a hallmark of scientific education at Hobart and William Smith, and now students have a new source of assistance with the Stanley Wheeler Midgley, Jr. and Constance Lax Midgley Environmental Studies Summer Research Fund.
Established in 2021 by the Midgley Foundation, with guidance from Eric Lax ’66, L.H.D. ’93, the $1 million endowment permanently funds summer research focused on environmental science and conservation, helping students understand challenges at the local, national and international levels — and put solutions into practice.
The Midgely Foundation is named for Lax’s cousin Constance and her husband Stan, who both cared deeply about conservation. Lax, who sits on the board of the foundation, apprised the other members of the wide-ranging environmental research and education that occurs at HWS, which led to the endowment in the Midgleys’ memory.
“Conservation and the environment become more important daily,” Lax says, “so it’s critical for students to have funding for their education and research. Knowing it’s there for generations to come, and that the Colleges can count on it, is a great comfort to me.”
Most student projects will be guided by HWS Environmental Studies faculty, but given the interdisciplinary nature of conservation research, the Midgley Fund will also support projects across the curriculum that align with environmental protection. And because research frequently requires travel and supplies, up to 20 percent of the annual support may be used for related expenses.
“For decades, our students have used the living laboratory of the Finger Lakes to explore urgent environmental questions, and now they will have perennial support to pursue innovative research and solutions,” says President Joyce P. Jacobsen. “We are grateful for the foresight and generosity of the Midgley Foundation, and for the friendship and stewardship of Eric Lax, whom we are proud to count among our esteemed alums.”
The inspiration behind the gift
To boost tourism after World War II, the Southern Pacific Railway sponsored a contest for the best film on the Colorado Rockies. Stan Midgley, who spent most summer vacations in Estes Park, Colo., had embarked on a promising career as a chemist and executive at Abbott Labs in Illinois, but when his film won the contest’s $1,000 prize, he promptly quit his job. An avid hiker and outdoorsman (he climbed every 14,000-foot peak in Colorado), he began traveling the country, producing more than a dozen films documenting Hawaii, Yosemite, autumn in New England and the breadth of the nation’s natural beauty. These hour-long travelogues — or “chucklelogues,” as they were known, for Stan’s witty narration and the sight gags he incorporated — drew large audiences across the country, including screenings for the National Geographic Society. Every March, the films ran on Detroit television.
Constance Lax — who was the youngest nurse matron in Britain during World War II — was hired to oversee the nurses in a 1,500-bed hospital in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit. She first met Stan after booking him to show a film for a hospital group. By then, each had more or less given up on the idea of marriage, but that soon changed.
Happiest when they were alone in the wilderness, “Stan and Constance felt there was nothing more important than conservation and keeping the earth alive,” says Eric Lax — so much so that they earmarked part of their estate to support environmental preservation. “I believe they would have approved wholeheartedly of the endowed fund that will train generation after generation of scientists and teachers committed to conservation.”
In addition to honoring his cousin and her husband, Lax is gratified to give back to the Colleges.
The falls at Watkins Glen State Park at the south end of Seneca Lake.
“I owe so much of my life to Hobart and William Smith,” says Lax, the bestselling and award-winning author of 10 books on subjects as diverse as the discovery and development of penicillin, medical breakthroughs on a bone marrow transplant ward, his own faith, and the life and work of Woody Allen and Humphrey Bogart. “The Colleges taught me how to think, to take pieces of information and turn them into something whole. I’m grateful for that daily.”
The relationships he forged at HWS have been just as meaningful. His first day in Geneva, Lax met Edie Sparago Irons ’66 on the Quad and they’ve been close ever since, co-chairing their 40th and 50th Reunion committees. Lax bonded with his senior year roommate, the Rt. Rev. George Packard ’66, through a shared faith “whose subsequent divergent evolutions have profoundly affected us both. [Packard] has been a steady touchstone for me, and graciously opened himself for my book Faith Interrupted,” Lax explains. Dr. Robert Peter Gale ’66, L.H.D. ’87 was a subject for another of Lax’s books, coauthor of yet another and has remained, along with Bob Curtis ’65, Sue Fisher Curtis ’65 and David Lewine ’64, among Lax’s closest friends.
“Without the late, great Peter Tauber ’68, my apartment mate of a dozen years, I would never have met my wife Karen,” Lax adds. “And Mara O’Laughlin ’66, L.H.D. ’13, my wise-cracking tablemate in the student union and date to the 1963 ROTC Ball, is responsible for admitting decades of impressive William Smith students.”
These friendships, and those with recent graduates like Ella Calder ’18 and Alex Kerai ’19, are the core of Lax’s fondness for HWS. He estimates that half of the campus was built since he graduated, and “probably more graduates have come through the Colleges in the past 55 years than in the 150 before, but to see that the people who are attracted and accepted to HWS are of such an impressive caliber is wonderful, even comforting,” Lax says. “Walking onto campus and talking with these young people, you realize how talented and smart they are, how lucky the Colleges are to have them and how lucky they are to have the Colleges.”
With guidance from Eric Lax ’66, L.H.D. ’93, the newly established Midgley Fund permanently supports summer research focused on environmental science and conservation.
After graduating with a degree in English, Lax joined the Peace Corps and was sent for two years to an island of 185 people on a quartersquare mile in the Chuuk district of Micronesia, which he calls “a small loss of memory in the Pacific.” He was later a Peace Corps fellow in Washington D.C., then Overseas Director of the Peace Corps School Partnership Program, which allowed him to travel to more than 40 countries. He published his first book, On Being Funny, in 1975. His books since have been translated into 18 languages. He also has given decades of his life to literary and human rights non-profits, especially PEN International, the global writers association. Now an International Vice President of PEN, Lax has served as president of PEN Center USA in Los Angeles and as a PEN International board member for many years.
FACULTY NEWS
2021 CAROLYN SHAW BELL AWARD
President Joyce P. Jacobsen is the recipient of the American Economic Association’s 2021 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. Named for the first chair of the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, the award is given annually “to an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession or mentoring others.” Jacobsen “excelled on all of these criteria,” as the AEA announcement noted. An “important scholar of labor economics and the economics of gender” and the first woman to serve as HWS president, Jacobsen “is an award-winning teacher, generous citizen of the profession, an exceptional advisor and mentor and a respected and skillful academic leader.” The award will be presented virtually during the 2022 AEA meeting.
President Joyce P. Jacobsen Kirin Makker
MAKING HISTORY
Associate Professor of American Studies Kirin Makker was featured in Good Morning America’s celebration of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who are “making history right now.” An architect, artist and writer, Makker was nominated by author Sejal Shah, who noted that the HWS professor “models collaborative work in her teaching, transcending conventional scripts. As a biracial/ bi-ethnic Asian American artist, her work begins from a point of multiple lenses. Makker is always searching for new ways of seeing, representing and moving through the world.” Pictured in the Saarinen-Knoll Womb Chair, Makker reimagined the icon of midcentury modern design for her project, The Womb Chair Speaks, with Abbey Frederick ’20 and Ainsley Rhodes ’19. Makker’s article about the project appears in the latest issue of Feminist Studies; another, co-authored with Frederick and Rhodes, is forthcoming in Art Journal. This fall, the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y., featured Makker’s “Blueprint Series,” which uses cyanotype on textiles and eggshells to “evoke the everyday, the below, the other, the queer, the unbelonging.” See what she’s working on, what her students are making and the occasional photo of her cat on Instagram @kirinmakker.
YOUR INTERNET BRAIN
Is the human brain a computer? This was the chief question posed in the Phi Beta Kappa lecture in 1971, when HWS celebrated Zeta Chapter’s
Daniel Graham Christine Goding-Doty
Paul Passavant
centennial. Fifty years later, Associate Professor of Psychological Science Daniel Graham has an answer: the best metaphor for the brain is not a computer — it’s the internet. As Graham writes in his new book An Internet in Your Head, neuroscientists are realizing that beyond performing computations, “the brain also must communicate within itself… [and] communication systems rely on different fundamental design principles than those of computing systems.” This new paradigm, he argues, can open new avenues of research for neuroscientists to unravel the brain’s routing mechanisms and unlock its deepest secrets. Learn more on his Psychology Today blog, Your Internet Brain.
COLONIALISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE
In a Los Angeles Review of Books interview this summer, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Christine Goding-Doty described the connections between colonialism and “the pipes, cables [and] data centers” that power our devices and the internet. As part of the LARB series, “Antiracism in the Contemporary University,” Goding-Doty, who studies race in the digital age, discussed her research with Tung-Hui Hu, a poet, digital culture scholar and University of Michigan professor. She told Hu that where race is concerned, “we can focus on the actions and intentions and relations of human beings, but they belong to a larger context of non-human activity.”
POLICING. PROTEST. POST-DEMOCRACY?
“Has the policing of protest become more aggressive and violent? If so, how did this happen? What does this mean?” asks Associate Professor of Political Science Paul Passavant in his new book, Policing Protest: The PostDemocratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection. Published this summer by Duke University Press, the book analyzes political protests in the U.S. and how policing such events has become increasingly hostile toward demonstrators.
FINDINGS
INTRIGUING FACULTY RESEARCH, REPORTED IN BRIEF*
Two planets were confirmed orbiting the Venus zone of a nearby dwarf star. ¶ Cuba’s economic isolation during the past 60 years helped limit the arrival and establishment of invasive plants. ¶ The cultural resurgence of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and conversations over the tribe’s future, are hampered by the lingering effects of the damming of the Elwha River in the early 20th century. ¶ A mathematical model explains why exposure to a low dose of hepatitis B leads to a slow expansion of the cells that fight the virus, and thus infection persists, but exposure to higher doses can lead to virus clearance. ¶ In the age of social media, multi-level marketing schemes exploit existing gender divides with faux-feminist rhetoric about female empowerment. ¶ Within 50 years of abandonment, post-agricultural forests contain a similar amount of biomass as older forests. ¶ Imaging microscopes and precision micromanipulators can be constructed DIY at a fraction of the cost of their commercially produced counterparts. ¶ Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems exert “an anxiety of influence” and “an anxiety of exile” on the work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. ¶ Most students in blended courses in Russian language found the combined video/in-person model preferable to the traditional course format. ¶ William Still, the first to document the Underground Railroad, saw his book as a cultural and political project as well as a road to financial autonomy for his employees, who, like Still himself, were once enslaved.
*visit hws.edu/findings for details
Trial by Science
What began as a faculty research collaboration more than a decade ago has become integrated in — and integral to — the HWS biology and chemistry departments.
BY ANDREW WICKENDEN ’09
In courses like organic chemistry or immunology, you won’t find any “canned” labs at HWS. No moot experiments with predetermined outcomes, because “that’s not really an experiment,” says Professor of Biology Sigrid Carle ’84.
Instead, she says, HWS students “get the real experience of being a scientist, the real process,” by working with Carle and her colleagues on cancer-related research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
With Professor of Chemistry Justin Miller, Carle has been studying the anti-cancer properties of certain compounds since the early 2000s. Over the years, their biochemical research has opened a gateway to lab work for scores of students, forming the basis of innovative courses, summer scholarship, independent studies and Honors projects.
“Is what we’re doing scholarship? Is it teaching? Yes, it’s both,” says Miller. “Our teaching is our scholarship and our scholarship is our teaching: there’s no way to disentangle them and we wouldn’t want to. That’s the whole point — students are learning by practicing. I think that’s the best way to teach.”
In the search for new anti-cancer drugs, Miller’s lab synthesizes compounds like those approved for FDA use, tweaking molecules to reveal potential therapeutic uses, which students then test in the cell biology courses taught by Carle. Similarly, Professor of Chemistry Erin Pelkey’s synthetic organic chemistry group develops strategies to identify potential new anticancer agents, which Professor of Biology Patricia Mowery and her students test for cytotoxicity (i.e. cell killing ability).
“Research is a valuable experience, whatever the institution, but at a small liberal arts college we’re able to have a much larger fraction of the student body do research,” says Mowery. “A small school setting allows for a much deeper mentorship.”
Before working in Mowery’s lab, Brianna Hurysz ’20 was planning for a career as a medical practitioner but “quickly realized how much I enjoyed research and solving problems that nobody else has solved yet,” she says. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences at the University of California San Diego, Hurysz says her research experience at HWS not only helped her realize she wanted to go to graduate school, “it also gave me the skills necessary to be competitive” among candidates from large research institutions.
The advantage at HWS, Pelkey says, is that students are in the driver’s seat, which is “an excellent model for education and training, as the students learn by doing real organic chemistry research…They initiate the independent studies, they work together in groups of two and three all year round.”
Matthew Burnett ’20 says the “dynamic environment” of Carle’s lab challenged him to “adapt to situations and address problems as they arise,” which is “extremely beneficial for a future career.” As are the opportunities for students to publish alongside their professors, adds Burnett, who is pursuing his master’s in microbiology and cell sciences at the University of Florida.
For Kaitlynn Sockett ’20, now a chemistry Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, the research that became the foundation of her Honors project “was intimidating,” she says, “but valuable preparation for grad school.” Her time in Pelkey’s research group underscored the importance of being able to “work independently and defend and explain the results.”
As Miller puts it, research at HWS pushes “students to learn a lot and contribute substantially to the project. If they have their goal and have the latitude, they’ll make mistakes but learn from them and come out better trained, better scientists, who know how to think scientifically and problem-solve.”
Jenna Hyman ’23 and Haley Sax ’23 run tests in Professor Mowery’s microbiology lab.
VOICES FROM BEYOND
This summer, HWS student researchers opened a window to Geneva’s past. Anthony Bray ’23, Samari Brown ’24, Sal Fabio ’22 and Christina Roc ’24 compiled biographies of notable Black Genevans, which inspired the dramatic monologues performed in September as part of a theatrical walking tour of downtown. From Beyond: Staging Geneva’s Unheard Voices offered contemporary audiences nuanced portraits of Black lives and experiences in the city more than a century ago. During the summer, Bray, Brown, Fabio and Roc worked with Associate Professor of Theatre Chris Woodworth, as well as archivists and librarians from HWS and Geneva, to unearth genealogical records, primary documents and historical artifacts, exploring how history itself is constructed and performed.
Brown says that as she researched and wrote about the life of Geneva teacher Nancy Lucas Curlin, she returned to the notion of challenging conventional historical narratives — not only “the lingering thought, ‘What can I do to play a role in the telling of a more accurate story,’ but also the mission: how will I rewrite (and right) history?”
