THE RECORD Online

Summer/Fall 2003 Features

Yielding Results: GC's Natural Sciences Division

Fans of the movie “The Incredible Hulk” know all too well that Gammasphere is the machine that blasts fictional scientist Bruce Banner with radiation, trans-forming him into a not so jolly green giant. In the real world, however, Gammasphere doesn’t produce gamma rays, it detects them.

Greenville College physics professor Dr. Arlene Larabee recently traveled to the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in the southwest suburbs of Chicago to participate in an experimental run at Argonne using the Gammasphere. Who served as her research assistant? Physics major Nathan Liechty.

“We were studying the element thallium-181, and trying to determine its decay processes, going from hi-energy to more stable states,” said Leichty. As interesting as the research was, the senior found networking with the international community to be the most rewarding part of the trip.

Larabee sees another side. “Nathan is a creative thinker with excellent technical skills and a solid understanding of basic physics principles. Students of this caliber are of immense value in helping Greenville College sustain and succeed in its research efforts.”

Since joining Greenville College in 1999, she hasn’t had much time for research, but this summer began collaborating with the Heavy-Ion Nuclear Physics research group at ANL. Larabee’s work involves the production of heavy-ion beams, smashed into various targets, to produce nuclei that spin at very high speeds. These nuclei decay to lower energy states by cascades of gamma-rays. The Gammasphere detects the gamma-rays from these highly energetic nuclei, allowing Larabee and her colleagues to reconstruct the gamma-ray decay pathways used by the nucleus. They will use these gamma-ray decay patterns to determine structural information about the nucleus, allowing scientists to test and improve their understanding of the nuclear force and its interactions.

“We are currently setting up the computer programs needed to analyze the Argonne data here at Greenville College,” said Larabee. When complete, students will have the opportunity to participate in invaluable research and gain the kind of experiential learning not always typical at this level.

“The percentage of students that we can involve in undergraduate research is quite large compared to a big university where only a small fraction (of them) are involved directly with a professor.”

Another newcomer to the department is Dr. Eugene Dunkley, who comes to GC with eight years of genetic engineering post-doc research performed at Oxford University in England. A native New Yorker, one of Dunkley’s projects involves looking at muscle atrophy and buildup.

“It’s important when you look at extended space travel,” said Dunkley, referring to the loss of muscle mass suffered by astronauts who spend extended periods in space.

Dunkley explained it’s important to keep muscle mass for as long as possible to prevent the weakness so common in the elderly. “Determining what causes this (atrophy) can be useful in understanding the aging process.” The project also looks at certain commonly-taken drugs, e.g., anti-inflammatory agents and leuko-corticoids, and what long-term effects these drugs have on muscle mass.

In January 2004, Dunkley and several other faculty members plan to collaborate with the Greenville Police Department to offer an introductory forensics course. Perhaps, in part, due to the popularity of the television drama, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” the class is already full. “Our department is looking at making it a concentration that can feed into biology, criminal justice and sociology majors,” said Dunkley.

The assistant professor of biology believes it’s important to have undergraduates in research to bring them to a higher level of understanding science.

“Students learn so much in the classroom, but the real learning takes place when they can apply what they’ve learned and come up with ideas of their own. Science is about exploration and investigation and allowing the mind to be curious. That’s where science comes alive.”

The benefits of undergraduate research are nothing new to Dr. Mark Ehrhardt. The summer after his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he worked on a project to set up a furnace atomic absorption spectrometer. “Basically it’s an instrument used by analytical chemists to determine whether or not certain metals are present in a sample,” the assistant professor of chemistry said. “This was an instrument that had been bought at an auction from the FDA by the college and they wanted to get it set up and implemented in the undergrad laboratories. That’s how I got started in undergrad research.”

Besides developing a passion for science, Ehrhardt landed a job in the university’s nuclear magnetic resonance laboratory, where he spent two and a half years.

“That really helped because it landed me my first job. When I graduated, I went to work for the Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company in Kalamazoo, Mich. Their prime reason for hiring me was the fact that I had this background in NMR.”

Though he accepted the position at Upjohn, Ehrhardt knew he wanted to go to graduate school. He completed his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January, 1998. It was there he began his teaching career, but it would take a few more years in post-doc research before Ehrhardt would enter the classroom full time.

Ehrhardt said being at GC was a bit of a culture-shock at first, since his prior college experiences had all been at large institutions of 20,000 plus students, but he quickly grew to appreciate the advantages of GC’s smaller size.

“Here, there’s much more of a personal element where the teacher understands you – that there’s more to your life than what’s going on in the classroom,” he said. “That’s neat, because as a believer, it’s a big deal for me to be able to impact individual lives.”

William “Buck” Batson felt the impact firsthand. Batson came to GC from Florida with a zeal for playing football and a lackluster fascination in academics. However, he did have an interest in science and decided to undertake a pre-med major. While early on Batson’s grades were good enough to “get by,” it wasn’t until he took organic chemistry with former chemistry professor Daryl Cox that Batson began to apply himself.

“He (Cox) pulled me aside after the first test and told me he could see potential, how I needed to apply myself and study,” said Batson. “That really sparked something in me. For a professor to take me aside and challenge me – from then on you couldn’t pull me away from the science building.”

Batson changed his major to biology and chemistry, graduating in ’98 and turned his attention to getting a Ph.D. instead of an M.D. This July, he successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Florida in Gainesville and credits his educational success to the interactions he had with his GC professors and the small class size.

Did his football career end when Batson focused more on the lab and less on the gridiron? Not at all.

“It made me more focused,” he said. “My senior year turned out to be the best on the field.”

Batson didn’t just transform academically. He gained spiritual growth by participating in bible studies and groups like Agora.

“The environment kept me from getting out of control. For the most part, it made me a better person and a better Christian. If I had gone to a big state school, I would have more likely joined a fraternity and flunked out.”
Like Batson, access to faculty was one of the primary reasons Stephen Bensing ’78 chose GC, even though he knew he might have access to better equipment and facilities elsewhere.

“I wanted something that would meet my needs academically,” he said, “but I was also attracted to a school that would give me more of that individual attention.”

Bensing said that having older equipment didn’t impede the learning process. “We had a gas gromatograph. It was a piece of equipment that kind of looked like the old TV sets with the round picture tube. Nothing was automated. You had to do everything manually, but we learned how to do it and we learned the idea.”

Later on, Bensing found out that even the big name schools don’t always have the best equipment. “About 10 years ago, I took a class at a local campus of Purdue University. I took an instrumentation class as a brush-up and I found out that the things I learned at GC were not so obsolete after all.”

Bensing was able to help upgrade the chemistry department’s equipment this past year with the donation of a atomic absorption spectrometer, courtesy of his employer, Grace-Davison.

Dr. James Lang has served as professor of biology for over 20 years and has seen a number of changes. He believes the division’s main strength comes from academic rigor.

“If you take physics, you take physics for physics majors; if you take chemistry, you take chemistry for chemistry majors and all of that tends to strengthen our undergraduates,” said Lang. “All of our majors take courses that are for majors in those disciplines. At many universities they don’t; they have a watered down bio-chemistry, genetics, or whatever else they’re teaching. We don’t think they get the depth they need to go on and work with it in the future. If our students decide to go on for Ph.D.s, they’re qualified. They’ve got the background and experience they need.”

Dr. William Ahern, who heads the biology department and has taught at GC since 1966, offers a historical perspective on the division’s success. “At least ninety percent of our pre-med students who apply to medical school get in,” he said. Ahern gave an even more compelling statistic regarding physics students and the 3/2 pre-engineering cooperative program GC has with Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Illinois.

“Since 1954, literally every student who completed the GC portion of this program has gone on to finish the remainder of their degree at the participating institution.” Students who complete this curriculum receive two bachelor’s degrees for their efforts.

Like the others, Ahern involves his students in research. Currently, he studies the chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica), a little gray bird that formerly lived in hollow trees that now makes its home in chimneys. Students taking his invertebrate zoology class this fall will lend a hand.

“The main thing they’ll do is identify the insects that chimney swifts eat,” he said. “They’ll learn the physical characteristics of these insects. They’ll become aware. It takes it out of memory and into actual learning.”

Ahern is quick to point out that student-involved exploration isn’t a new thing at Greenville College. He cites alumnus Dr. Brooks Burr ‘71, currently professor of zoology at Southern Illinois University and co-author of the Peterson Field Guide to North American Fishes. As an undergraduate, Burr took part in faculty-led studies and Ahern believes it’s this kind of practical experience that gave Burr the start to a career where he has achieved international recognition as an authority on endangered species of fresh water fish.

Another divisional asset are the faculty who bring a wealth of knowledge and experience from work they’ve done in the private sector, either before they arrive at Greenville College or while on sabbatical.

A case in point is Dr. Hugh Siefken, who heads up the entire division. A physicist of national renown, Siefken has a lengthy list of awards and publications that spans over 35 years. He began his teaching career at GC in 1969 but during the ‘80s, when former President Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly referred to as “Star Wars,” Siefken played a part in history by becoming one of the scientists involved with its development while on sabbatical working for McDonnell Douglas Astronautics.

After the sabbatical was over, Lockheed offered Siefken a very generous compensation package to become one of their chief physicists, but Siefken preferred academe and chose to return to GC. He continues the work he started all those years ago, studying and producing negative hydrogen ions. His motivation is twofold.

“Negative hydrogen is the ingredient that keeps fusion reactions fueled,” he said. “Fusion is superior to coal as an energy source.” Critics of nuclear waste should be aware the by-product from producing these ions isn’t toxic to the environment, it’s helium.

Having a caring and committed faculty, who involve their students in new and exciting research, gaining real world knowledge, are just a few of the reasons the natural sciences division performs so well. These devoted professors ignite a passion for lifelong learning, and ultimately, for Greenville College.

Last updated: September 22, 2003