TEDx Talks to Mason
A Walk to Remember This Saturday, Mason will host the 16th Annual Victim’s Rights Walk/Run. NEWS• Page 3
Tickets for online lecture series were gone an hour after they became available. STYLE • Page 4
From the NFL to Mason After a 24-year career in pro football, Charley Casserly inspires a new generation. SPORTS • Page 11
George Mason University’s Student Newspaper www.broadsideonline.com
April 23, 2012
Volume 88 Issue 22
Students Develop Model Wetland
Federman Beats Cancer Student Survives Two Bouts of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Gregory Connolly Editor-in-Chief
Photo by: Stephen Kline
Professor Changwoo Ahn works with students to create new wetlands mesocosms as a way to research wetland soil erosion. The compound, located near the West Campus parking lot, will be full of these miniature-environments when the class is finished with their project.
Research to Show Effects of Erosion, Wetland Expansion Michael Lagana Staff Writer Students are helping to develop a model wetland to research the effects of wetland erosion and the benefits of expanding wetland to the Earth’s soil. Changwoo Ahn, a wetlands ecologist and associate professor with the department of Environmental Science and Policy, developed the Wetland Mesocosm Compound in 2007 with the intent of bringing outdoor environmental study to George Mason University. “Four years ago, I built [the Wetland Mesocosm Compound] purely with my experience and my idea that the school would need an outdoor teaching and research facility,” Ahn said. “Many big research-oriented schools have this kind of facility, [like] schools that I used to work at before I came to George Mason University, so I had a vision to build this kind of facility before.” Ahn’s vision for an outdoor research center came to fruition in 2007 with the support of a Sustainability Office grant, the
Office of the Provost, ESP, and better understand how rising Long Fence, an area fencing water levels affect erosion in company that donated $20,000 coastal wetland environments. worth of chain link fencing to Another important aspect enclose the compound. The site of Ahn’s course is teaching his is located bestudents hind Intramural how to efField I near the “I’ve learned a lot about f e c t i v e l y West Campus conduct exhow research goes parking lot. periments Inside the and gather, down, wetland science compound, Ahn and ecology. It’s good to graph and and his students interpret get involved and get to are working on the data. developing “At the work.” mesocosms, or end of this medium-sized, s e m e s te r, -Alex Sessums, junior biology contained wetand it’s almajor land models. r e a d y H o w e v e r, drawing to unlike microan end, cosms or Petri dish colonies, [the students] are actually parmesocosms are in large rubber ticipating in setting up these tubs and are exposed to all the new experiments as part of their natural elements of the environ- learning in the semester curricument, such as sunlight and lum in the Ecological Sustainweather. ability course,” Ahn said. “In the One benefit of using meso- summertime, we are going to cosms for research comes from continue to monitor the growing manipulation of water levels in of the plants and the hydration the tubs so that observers can see of the mesocosms and all those the effects of rising water levels environmental barriers throughon a small, contained wetland out.” environment. Ahn sees incorporating unAccording to Ahn, this is dergraduate research as a fundaimportant so researchers can mental aspect of his course.
Junior biology major Alex Sessums has been learning about wetland restoration in Ahn’s class all semester and is enthusiastic to be able to help build a model that will aid work in wetland restoration. “I’ve learned a lot about how research goes down, wetland science and ecology,” Sessums said. “It’s good to get involved and get to work.” In addition to his work with Mason, Ahn is working with members of surrounding communities to get them more involved with the work that he and his students are doing at the compound. “I’m trying to reach out to the other communities, not only on campus but off campus, to let them know that we have these facilities,” Ahn said. “This year we’re going to have three high school students doing a small project here over the summer.” In about three years, after Ahn and his students have completed their experimentation and data collection, their findings will be gathered, analyzed and put in a paper, which will be submitted for publication in a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal.
When Jacob Federman, a junior sports management major, went out to celebrate his 21st birthday last weekend, it wasn’t at some dimly lit dive bar or at a glitzed-out, neon tourist trap. He went to the George Mason University Relay For Life. The now-21-year-old doesn’t have the proclivity for strong drink or smoke that characterizes many people during their college years. He doesn’t want to subject his body to that after twice beating Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Relay For Life was held in Federman’s honor two years ago, when he was mired in his second fight against cancer. Federman first beat Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a cancer of the lymph tissue — when he was in high school. After chemotherapy treatments and radiation knocked out the cancer, his doctors told him that if it were to return, it would come back within a year. Three and a half years later, Federman, then a freshman at Mason, was back home in New York for spring break. He went in for his routine visit, and that’s when the doctors found something during their checkup. They said they would be in touch when they knew what it was. “I went back to Fairfax the next morning and saw my friends who already knew what happened the first time around,” Federman said. “I said, ‘Hey, there’s a good chance that this is my last week at Mason.’” Shortly thereafter, his mother left a voicemail he heard when he got out of class. The cancer had returned. The First Bout When Federman was 15, he accompanied other teens on a sixand-a-half-week tour of the United States. As soon as the trip began, Federman felt like he had a cold — there was coughing that doctors in Seattle and Los Angeles attributed to his asthma — but when his mother picked him up at the end of the trip, she knew something was wrong, and it was time to see another doctor. “They thought it was asthma that could have been out of control,” said Marci Greenberg, Federman’s mother. “I figured it must have been pneumonia, but I wanted a chest X-ray.” Before Greenberg and Federman even arrived home, Greenberg received a phone call. “We did see something,” the pulmonologist said of the X-ray. Next came a CT scan on the Friday of that week, before they went to
visit Greenberg’s parents. It was Friday afternoon that Greenberg received the call from the pulmonologist confirming the prognosis: stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Greenberg and Federman went ahead with the visit to her parents, and Greenberg didn’t tell Federman about the cancer until Sunday night, hours before returning to Columbia University Medical Center to begin planning treatment. “I kept the secret because I didn’t want to ruin anything,” Greenberg said. “How do you explain to your teenager that he’s probably going to have chemo, radiation, lose his hair, feel horrible? How do you do that?” Greenberg said she told Federman that there would be sick kids at the hospital and not to be unduly worried. It was there that Federman asked Greenberg if he was going to die. “I said, ‘No, you’re not, Jake. Don’t even ask me that. It’s not going to happen for a long, long time,’” Greenberg said. “He never looked back after that. He never questioned it. He never got depressed. He never cried.” Federman said it was daunting to receive the news. “I was 15, so the only thing I knew about cancer was ‘OK, you have it. Now you’re going to die,’” Federman said. “I was in disbelief.” While Federman’s friends from the cross-country trip were enjoying their summer, Federman spent long hours in doctors’ offices prepping for biopsies and a run of outpatient chemotherapy treatment cycles that stretched from Aug to Nov of his soph. year of high school. After over 40 clinic visits, Federman’s results impressed his doctors. “They were so impressed with the way my body responded that they presented my case to the board of oncologists,” Federman said. Though he was tired from long days at the clinic, he hadn’t experienced some of the more adverse effects of the drugs and chemotherapy. Next came a radiation treatment that lasted from the beginning of December to Christmas. Though the doctors believed the cancer was gone, they said a precautionary radiation treatment was a good final step in ensuring the cancer had been eradicated. Then, right around Christmas, came the news Federman and his family had been waiting for: The cancer was gone. The residual scarring from the biopsies would go away over time. The hair he lost from the treatment would return.
See FEDERMAN Page 2
Bad Luck Lingers Mason Baseball Player Beats the Odds Colleen Wilson Sports Editor He threw the pitch and watched it sail toward home. His team was down, and he had been brought in as a relief pitcher. The first batter had struck out. The second got a hit. Now what? Where was the ball? What was going on? He stumbled back, then caught himself. “My first baseman was at my side and asking if I was okay. I said, ‘I don’t know what happened.’ I was still looking for the ball,” said Kevin Lingerman, senior pitcher for the George Mason University baseball team. The next time he looked up there was blood everywhere.
Lingerman sank to his knees, then to all fours as he tried to piece together what was going on. Lingerman was still looking for the ball. Trouble was, the ball had found him first. The batter had hit Lingerman’s pitch and returned it at 100 mph into his face. His face was broken in five places, completely smashing his nose, orbital bone and the top of his jaw. “The day it happened we were getting beat pretty good,” said Mick Foley, the sophomore first baseman who was first to Lingerman’s side. “It was already silent in the park because we were getting killed. Then Lingerman got hit it and it was a whole different kind of silence.”
Foley had watched the ball fly straight towards Lingerman and heard a loud snap he thought was the ball making contact with the pitcher’s glove. But then he saw the ball rolling off the field and towards the third base dugout and noticed that the batter had slowed to a crawl in his dash to first base, and he realized that the loud snap had actually been the crack of Lingerman’s skull. Foley ran to Lingerman’s side as he lay sprawled on his back. “There was blood all over,” Foley said. “I couldn’t really see if his nose was broken. All I saw was blood.”
See LINGERMAN Page 8
Photo Courtesy of Mason Athletics
Kevin Lingerman pitched last season in a game versus Rider College before his accident. Lingerman missed time earlier this season after an injury sustained in a game versus Bryant University.