Lipscomb Now: Discovery 2023

STUDENTS forge their own path TO DISCOVERY

Igniting opportunities for growth, learning and discovery

Since its founding in 1891, Lipscomb University has been devoted to educating students with academic excellence to positively change the world for good. Together, we are focused on creating transformative educational experiences that allow our students to grow intellectually, socially and spiritually throughout their time at Lipscomb. Our focus on scholarship is igniting opportunities for growth, learning and contributions to knowledge in a variety of fields. As scholars, our students and faculty play an important role in advancing knowledge in their disciplines. Their work is critical to expanding the frontiers of understanding and vital to the future of our society, with research that provides insights into pressing issues, challenges existing understanding and creates new avenues of inquiry.

In this issue, we will share the progress that Lipscomb is making in these areas. The Office of Research and Grants and the new University Research Council are building support for our faculty in their scholarship endeavors, while the new Digital Repository allows us to share the knowledge developed at Lipscomb with the world. The Lipscomb Health Sciences Center will serve as a hub of research for our health science programs and the new Ph.D. program will nurture emerging scholars in their growth at Lipscomb (Read more about these Impact 360 advancements on page 3). We are looking forward to sharing more with you!

Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker Provost

focus on the FUTURE

Engineering students with Dr. Max David Collao using the college’s wind tunnel for an experiment. See more about Collao’s summer 2023 research to apply Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to predict air flow behavior on page 36

In August 2022 Lipscomb University rolled out the Impact 360 strategic plan. Much like the deliberate, step-by-step procedure of the scientific method, Lipscomb’s Impact 360 is a step-by-step process to align the university community under a clear and unifying mission and carry out a plan toward a common vision for the future.

Since the first moments the strategic plan began to develop in 2021, rigorous academics, and specifically research, have been a major focus of discussion. In its roll-out year, much change has occurred and many new milestones have been achieved, kick-starting Impact 360’s aspirational goal to:

“Promote meritorious research and scholarly productivity enabling the transition from a doctoral/professional university to a high research activity university.”

The 2022-23 year has brought a number of measurable steps forward within the tactics devised to pursue this goal, which in practice means striving to meet the criteria for the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Carnegie

Classification of R2: Doctoral UniversityHigh Research Activity.

An administrative infrastructure has been developed to promote research, scholarly activity and creativity through the creation of various new roles within the Office of Research and Grants, established under the umbrella of the Provost’s Office in spring 2022.

In October, Dr. Trace Hebert was appointed as Lipscomb’s new associate provost of research and graduate studies. He was charged to oversee the Office of Research and Grants, support processes such as Lipscomb’s Institutional Review Board, to manage the Impact 360 goals related to research, lead and provide strategic direction in managing graduate programs and collaborate on marketing initiatives for graduate programs.

As the founding and continuing director of Lipscomb’s Doctor of Education program and professor of educational leadership since 2010, Hebert has extensive experience establishing graduate-level, research-based programs, including personally mentoring

Lipscomb’s education doctorate students working on their dissertation research. Prior to Lipscomb, Hebert served in leadership roles at Rochester College, Specs Howard School of Media Arts, Faulkner University and Northeastern Christian Jr. College.

Since the fall of 2021, the Office of Research and Grants has also added Robyn Saakian, director; Susan Lloyd, coordinator and compensation analyst; Rebecca Johns, director of academic finance; a responsible conduct in research coordinator position; and a research integrity officer position.

In addition, the office’s new online resources promote research administration and compliance best practices that support excellence and quality for the research environment.

A new University Research Council has been created to consolidate key stakeholders and highlight research strengths and focus areas across disciplines. Council members represent each college on campus with rotating three-year terms.

A strategic plan to promote scholarly activity in service to a premier, learner-focused Christian education

“Research is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.”

–Albert Szent-GyÖrgyi, Nobel Prize winner

focus on the FUTURE

The purpose of the council is to advise the Provost’s Office on all matters pertaining to research including promotion and growth; improving competitiveness for external funding; website and information distribution practices; and proposals regarding research related support, policies and procedures.

The research council will create subcommittees to address research misconduct; research symposiums; Institutional Review Board policies; responsible conduct of research training and practices; and establishing centers of research excellence (COREs), among other topics.

As an education leader in Nashville, a city recognized as a capital in the health care industry, the university launched the Lipscomb University Health Sciences Center (LUHSC), in February to serve as a hub that encompasses academic programs, research initiatives, and community engagements and partnerships.

Created out of a reorganization of the existing College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences into two stand-alone entities, the existing College of Pharmacy and a newly formed College of Health Sciences, LUHSC will allow for more focused programming and resources.

“Elevating health sciences education to an academic center is a common model among the top universities in the nation to further health sciences education, research and practice,” said Lipscomb President Dr. Candice McQueen.

The LUHSC is poised to facilitate the creation of new programs and Lipscomb COREs, academic and intellectual communities of researchers with similar interests, as it provides an umbrella structure for researchers across campus to collaborate with the health science faculty. The University Research Council worked to develop a plan to establish COREs in the future during the spring semester, said Hebert.

Among the center’s areas of focus will be growing Lipscomb’s biomedical research portfolio; creating a national model for interprofessional education and collaborative care; developing impactful partnerships with industry and the health care sector to provide practice site opportunities and workforce partnerships; and growing and expanding crossdisciplinary health sciences programs across Lipscomb’s academic enterprise.

In the coming years Lipscomb University will continue to promote meritorious research and scholarly productivity by developing new doctorate programs, most immediately through the new Doctorate of Philosophy in Leadership and Policy Studies announced in February.

This interdisciplinary program will prepare students for high-level careers in leadership and service across a range of sectors with an emphasis on preparing leaders in education, as of this fall, and in public service and health care, as of fall 2024.

While housed in Lipscomb’s nationally recognized College of Education, it is offered in collaboration with Lipscomb’s College of Business, College of Health Sciences and College of Leadership & Public Service.

This three-year program includes a research component and dissertation in addition to its core curriculum and options for guided electives in education leadership and policy, public service leadership and policy, and health care leadership and policy. It will help students develop many of the personal core competencies valued in today’s businesses and organizations, such as strategic planning, organizational skills, project management, problem solving, team leadership and adaptability.

“The goal is to equip professionals who can pursue challenging high-level tasks requiring advanced knowledge, training and rigor, and to do so with the highest levels of integrity, ethical understanding and behavior,” said Hebert. “Another critical component is that students will be able to focus on a research topic about which they are passionate, that is in-depth, dissertation-level research.”

The Ph.D. in Leadership and Policy Studies is the fifth doctoral-level program and the second Ph.D. program offered by Lipscomb.

Also, in the past year, the university began to leverage the power of the Beaman Library by establishing the Carolyn Wilson Digital Collections (digitalcollections.lipscomb. edu), a digital repository capable of housing the scholarly work product of all Lipscomb researchers.

This database, powered by the Digital Commons platform, is intended to serve as a centralized digital space to publish all of Lipscomb’s research outcomes, said Jan Cohu, systems librarian and member of the University Research Council.

So far, the platform provides access to doctoral students’ dissertations; abstracts of student research presented at the Student

Scholars Symposium; faculty scholarly publications; selected items from the Robert E. Hooper Archives; digitized images of The Backlog, Lipscomb’s yearbook, dating back to 1910; and the open access publication, the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

Future plans include posting digitized images of The Babbler, Lipscomb’s student newspaper of years’ past; students’ master’s theses; and faculty poster presentations, conference papers and data sets, said Cohu. The platform can even host original music compositions or public performances of public domain works, she said.

Having such a digital repository makes a big impact on scholars’ ability to find Lipscomb’s research through Internet search engines such as Google and is an important step in garnering recognition from the scholarly community, said Cohu.

In addition, a centralized clearinghouse promotes collaboration among Lipscomb’s own researchers in complementary fields. Searchers within Lipscomb can have access to their fellow researchers’ work that would otherwise be hidden behind paywalls. Published research for a whole department can be downloaded for grant proposals and accreditation reviews, said Cohu.

The Center for Vocational Discovery

Decades of theological scholarship lead to an innovative new venture in 2022.

Just as Lipscomb’s new Center for Vocational Discovery (CVD) uses a compass as the defining image of each student’s journey of self-discovery, so also one might need to pull out a compass to keep track of all the academic paths that converged at the university to establish the center this past fall.

The lifelong scholarship of Bible, business and education professors has now come together under the unifying vision of Lipscomb Impact 360. While this convergence happened somewhat organically during development of the strategic plan, it became reality when President Dr. Candice McQueen championed the idea of intentionally centering in one place the various work happening around Lipscomb’s mission and focus. The CVD opened in fall 2022 and now provides each student a four-year journey of life discovery that unifies the entire undergraduate experience.

The future of the center and how it impacts students is grounded in a foundation of psychological, spiritual and learning research that informs each of its pillars: vocation, spiritual development through narrative, a four-year portfolio experience and integration of faith and work, so that each student leaves confidently equipped and committed to living a purposeful life focused on bettering our world.

At the trailhead…

Dr. Earl Lavender (BA ’77, MDiv ’86), professor and director of missional studies in Bible, has been highly interested in the spiritual perceptions of Lipscomb’s students since he began teaching at Lipscomb in 1991. That interest was fueled by his personal background.

As the son of missionaries who spent his first professional years planting a church while serving as a player/coach for

With structure and programming based on research by various Lipscomb scholars, the CVD opened in fall 2022 to provide each undergraduate student a four-year journey of life discovery that unifies their entire undergraduate experience.

IDENTITY PURPOSE VOCATION LOCATION

a semi-pro baseball team in Italy, Lavender developed the firm belief that God’s Kingdom is better served by people who are prepared in fields other than ministry but who know how to proclaim the Gospel.

“Because I managed and played on their city team, I had evangelistic inroads that I would not have otherwise had,” said Lavender of his time coaching in Italy. “So I’ve always had this vision of the power of every student at a university becoming involved in God’s mission, the vision of taking missions out of the Bible department and making it the heartbeat of the

university. Every student has the amazing possibility of being on mission with God—no matter what vocational choice they make.”

Within the last decade, as the demographics of faith have changed both in America’s congregations and at Lipscomb, Lavender has made a point each year to personally interview each and every student in his general education required Bible courses.

Lavender’s piles of notebooks from his qualitative interviews with students has made at least one trend among today’s emerging adults and their approach to faith very clear, he said.

Thirty years ago, most Lipscomb students were from Church of Christ backgrounds and came to campus with “little interest in the biblical story. They were here to be trained to go into the world and live a prosperous life,” he said.

Today’s student is much different, his interviews show. “They know that they want to create value instead of just earning money.”

The numbers of Church of Christ-raised students enrolling at Lipscomb has been steadily declining over the past two decades. Many of the students Lavender sees today have no faith background or only a vague sense of wanting to attend a faith-based school. So they typed “Christian university South” into a Google search to discover Lipscomb.

“Today’s students come to campus searching and saying, ‘Teach us what we need to know,’” said Lavender.

“Earl began teaching his classes as an invitation to God’s story,” said Dr. Leonard Allen, dean of the College of Bible & Ministry (CBM). “He challenges his non-Christian students to think about how this story could enhance their best self, and he has found that some of these students do go on to become Christians.”

Based on that analysis and success, the CBM re-worked its four general education Bible courses in 2006 to become “a narrative story of Israel, Jesus and the Church that is designed to say to students: ‘This is a narrative in which you are invited to participate.’”

The final general education Bible class, Faith and Culture, says to students: “Now that you know the story, how are you going to live it out?” said Lavender.

A traveler joins the journey…

In 2018, a new traveler joined the journey toward the CVD. Dr. Steve Bonner (BA ’01, MA ’02, MDiv ’04, MACM ’20), professor and associate dean of undergraduate Bible, brought additional perspective and scholarly tools to bring the vision to fruition.

Bonner spent almost a decade at Lubbock Christian University researching adolescent psychosocial development. His task at Lipscomb was to overhaul the undergraduate Bible curriculum based on his expertise.

As mid-adolescence extends, psychosocial behaviors that were once limited to high school students are making their way into the collegeaged population, said Bonner. “College students are not adults. Developmentally they are just not there yet,” he said.

Specifically a psychological behavior called “multiple selves” is becoming more pervasive among today’s college students, he said.

Students think of their own self-identity in different ways based on the specific situation they face. Such “multiple selves” are exacerbated as a method of self-protection in the face of social pressures and adults’ inconsistent pressures for mid-adolescents to perform, to the point where many college students are cognitively unable to apply abstract learning from one of their selves to situations faced by another one of their selves, Bonner said.

“We can no longer assume that students can apply what they learn in one class to another class,” said Bonner. “Imagine the implications for the Church. We assume our teens are practically applying what they learn about morals and Christian values in youth groups, but the reality is that they don’t have the ability to apply those lessons across the board in their lives.”

Lavender, who had already started doing his own research into Generation Z to understand why they showed an inability to connect the dots, embraced Bonner’s research conclusions and re-formatted his general education Bible classes to include more consistent reminders of content, with corresponding study guides and Powerpoint slides, and accommodations such as open book tests.

focus on the

After five years, his general education non-Bible majors are showing stronger learning outcomes, he said.

Next the CBM, “intentionally built in touchpoints to facilitate integration of selves,” primarily through piloting a portfolio system that required students to submit assignments that would carry over into their next class, said Bonner.

The concept, now being implemented through the CVD, is that in each of the three Bible classes and the freshman Lipscomb Experience course, students are assigned to write a personal reflection, with each assignment building on the last as they progress through the coursework.

In the Story of Israel, students are asked to select a character in the Old Testament, consider his or her purpose, their vocation as God intended and their response to God’s purposes for his or her life. Then students are asked to draw appropriate conclusions on how this character’s biblical journey pertains to their own identity, vocation and purpose, thus answering the question, “How do I see myself in the world?”

In the Story of Jesus course, students are asked to select three passages from Luke that

“challenge or motivate you to live in a way that you flourish.” While explaining the basic teachings of the three passages, the students must also explain in their papers, “what would it mean to pattern your life after Jesus who died on a cross to show us how to find true meaning in life?”

Through the CVD, Lavender hopes the future will bring more spiritual touchpoints and continuity of learning to the entire student body throughout the university, not just in curriculum but through student services, chapel, academics and global travel. “They have to hear the same things they hear in Bible class in chapel as well, and in their management class as well. If you provide just a curriculum, but don’t pull it into a unified experience, they forget. You have to give them an idea they can hold onto,” he said.

Meanwhile another scholar heads toward Lipscomb on his own path…

While Lavender was watching students’ changing views on faith over 30 years, another now-Lipscomb scholar was busy pioneering academic thought and programs

to promote the idea of “vocation,” more often understood in the Christian world as the response to a “calling.”

In 1999, the Lilly Endowment, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of religion, education and community development, announced a national initiative in theological exploration of vocation, God’s calling to meaningful work. They invited 138 church-related colleges to propose projects to help students think more about vocation and less about career.

Dr. Richard Hughes, then at Pepperdine University, answered the call with a proposal noting that “we can’t encourage students to think about vocation if we don’t help our faculty think about it first.”

Over the past 30 years, Hughes has secured more than $3.5 million in grant money to carry out vocation-based initiatives including weeklong faculty retreats, seminars for new faculty and other theological exploration of vocation.

Since coming to Lipscomb as a scholar-in-residence in 2015, Hughes has instilled the idea of Christian vocation— that life in any career is a sacred journey— into the faculty through seminars and new

Rob Touchstone (right), director of the CVD, has created curriculum for Integrating Work and Faith courses and designed a program for missional business, economics and entrepreneurship.

faculty orientations. As the paths began to converge, the CVD faculty say they drew more from Hughes’ deep knowledge of vocation and how it plays out on Christian colleges nationwide than any other resource.

Today, the CVD defines vocation as a student’s chosen engagement in the world as an expression of their identity and purpose. It is the context through which students pursue their calling.

Paths converge in the Center for Vocational Discovery

The CVD was established in 2022 as an outcome of the Impact 360 strategic planning process, and Lavender along with Dr. Hope Nordstrom, special counsel to the president for strategy, were installed by McQueen as co-leaders for strategy and development of the center.

The first cohort to embark on the program’s four-year journey was the 2022 freshman class. They began with the theme of identity and will progress annually to focus on purpose, vocation and location.

When it came time to find a director to run day-to-day operations of the center and interact with students on a daily basis, the team turned to a faculty member who had already been focused on integrating faith and work since coming to Lipscomb in 2015.

Rob Touchstone (BA ’97, MDiv ’12) has two degrees in Bible, but made his name in Nashville as an entrepreneur in 2012, when he created the vision for and co-founded The Well Coffeehouse as a social enterprise. Now with multiple locations around the city, his coffee shops turn profits into clean water for those in need.

As the the creator and director of the Lipscomb College of Business’ Center for Business As Mission (BAM), Touchstone created curriculum for Integrating Work and Faith courses in both business and health care majors, created a BAM fellowship program and taught all his students to think missionally about business, economics and entrepreneurship. “I believe every student, on some level, has a longing to know themselves deeply and to live

into a bigger story with an authentic sense of purpose. Many students desire to explore the intersection of their faith and their work and how their careers can matter beyond earning a paycheck,” said Touchstone.

Brent Roe-Hall, assistant dean of vocation and spiritual formation, serves as assistant director, bringing the CVD a crucial link to carry out its work in daily student life, including weekly chapel services.

Drawing from a cohort model that Bonner developed for Bible majors, one of the first things the CVD implemented in the 2022-23 school year was a freshman-only chapel, allowing freshmen to build stronger relationships within their own class and allowing the chapel coordinators to focus on the same message provided to students through the CVD’s workshops on spiritual gifts and career exploration: the 34 qualities outlined in a strengths assessment.

In the spring semester, the CVD began holding workshops on resilience, gifts, strengths and genograms and held a listening retreat to help students discern the voice of God in their lives.

“We are at a critical moment where students are searching for meaning beyond rigid religious systems,” said Lavender. “So we need to make sure the Biblical story becomes a livable narrative for life, to all, for the glory of God.

“The Bible shouldn’t just be a separate curriculum to the side of the main course. It should be integrated into the entire way of life at Lipscomb,” Lavender said. “The continual message should be that we are all producing value in our lives, no matter what we choose to do in the world.”

This approach ties directly into how intentional McQueen desires this work to be at Lipscomb. “Our founders always desired Lipscomb to be a place where we learn to live as a Christian in all walks of life—including work,” she said, at the dedication ceremony. “The CVD is ensuring we make this much more intentional from the moment each new student walks on campus.”

Learn more about the center at lipscomb.edu/CVD

Dr. Earl Lavender , executive director of the CVD, has been highly interested in the spiritual perceptions of Lipscomb’s students since he began teaching at Lipscomb in 1991.

28 DEPARTMENTS 58 PRESENTATIONS

95 POSTERS 18 POETRY READINGS AND PERFORMANCES

AT THE 2023 STUDENT SCHOLARS SYMPOSIUM

Striking out on their own

Proactive students forego academic credit in pursuit of new knowledge

Student Scholars Symposium serves as showplace for students’ independent research.

Whether it is continuing an interest discovered through an internship, indulging a curious nature after a fascinating class, preparing for a future career field or simply craving to know more, each school year Lipscomb students go above and beyond their required coursework to actively learn

Through independent studies that earn minimal college credit or simply as an extracurricular project with a faculty mentor, students are carrying out research in the sciences, education, the arts and more, on their own time.

In April, these proactive students, along with hundreds of others who carry out research through coursework, thesis and dissertation work, internships or in Lipscomb’s pharmaceutical science labs, are afforded the opportunity to present their results at the Student Scholars Symposium, before an audience of their peers.

The 2023 Student Scholars Symposium featured 308 students presenting on topics as diverse as the history of tattoo art to rocket engineering, from poetry to cybersecurity.

Conducting a project from starting hypothesis to ending conference presentation is an experience that many students not only value for their career prospects, but also feel is empowering and thought-provoking, said Dr. Florah Mhlanga, symposium director and senior associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Here are just a few of the knowledgebuilding projects included in this year’s

Finding home in children’s literature

Some students are fueled to carry out a research project by a passion to better the world in a particular way, such as the trio of sophomores: Ella Saakian, law, justice and society major; Emma Salvitti, family science major with a focus on mental health professions; and Camden Fain, communications major.

Saakian so enjoyed her internship with Lipscomb University’s Camp Explore: Reading and Writing in Nashville, a summer literacy enrichment camp for students at Nashville’s J.E. Moss Elementary School, that when school started again she approached the camp’s director Dr. Jeanne Fain about designing a research project focused on children’s literature.

Saakian gathered the team who became the first undergraduates that Jeanne Fain, director of the master’s level English language learning program in the College of Education, had ever worked with. As Saakian and Salvitti both have immigrant roots, and drawing inspiration from the theme of the upcoming International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) conference, the students and Jeanne Fain chose to do an analysis of color in pictures in selected children’s literature about immigration journeys with the aim to assist teachers in providing inclusivity within book selection in an elementary language arts curriculum.

symposium completed by students who struck out on their own path to discovery.

Aaron Hardy, junior civil engineering major, partnered with the chemistry department to learn about materials that effect the strength of concrete at the chemical level.

Using an established academic framework to analyze children’s literature through color, perspective and positioning of words to the characters, Salvitti looked at each of the eight books to see how they supported the concept of “home” as more than a physical place. Saakian looked at how the books portrayed acclimating to a new environment, and Camden Fain looked at the process of the immigrants’ journey.

“I have a passion for creating more understanding of diverse cultures,” said Salvitti, who said the process of the study has given her an even broader awareness of multiculturalism in the United States.

Jeanne Fain said the trio’s work is not only at a level that is publishable, but that it will also likely spark continued research efforts on her part to create a convenient tool that teachers can use to assess how culturally inclusive a particular book may be as they are developing their lesson plans.

“This group of researchers thoughtfully used their skills as visual learners to conduct a carefully thought out visual analysis of immigration picture books. Their skills were leveraged to conduct a critical content analysis of the books in this project,” she said. “I think

it’s easy to underestimate the phenomenal research skills that undergraduates possess. This project taught me to facilitate the research process with a specific framework and step back while watching them figure out how to approach their learning.”

In addition to the Student Scholars Symposium, these students’ work has been accepted to be presented at the highly selective IRSCL 2023 Congress: Ecologies of Childhood conference in August at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in collaboration with Stanford University.

Learning in harmony

Caleb Taylor is a senior piano major from College Grove, Tennessee, who wants to go on to be a surgeon. Wesley Butler is a junior commercial music major who wants to be a songwriter. In the day-to-day process of collegiate music study, these two students wouldn’t interact very much.

But in the fall semester, the pair were teamed up for their final project in their Music Theory II class: to analyze the orchestral work, Vessel of Joy, composed by Lipscomb Assistant Professor and Director of Instrumental Studies Dr. Ben Blasko. They both loved the process and liked

working together, as they each brought a different perspective to the goal.

Their instructor, Dr. Jenny Snodgrass, academic director and professor in the School of Music, saw how much they liked the project and suggested that they take a deeper dive into the piece in the spring through an independent study with her. She asked them: “Do you want to take this to the next level?”

They did. The pair worked weekly, oneon-one in Snodgrass’ office throughout the spring semester to break down the three-anda-half-minute piece into sections, to analyze each section by chords, formal sections, cadences and themes.

“The cadence points, which are like commas in the music, can have different connotations and can make the audience feel differently, depending on where they are placed,” said Butler. “We defined the themes developed through each instrument and looked at different cadence timing and modulations.”

After conducting their analysis of the piece, the students were able to discuss their thoughts with Blasko, the composer, and determine how accurate their analysis was compared to his intentions while composing the piece.

Emma Salvitti (left) and Dr. Jeanne Fain (right) look over some of the eight children’s books they analyzed in an independent research project.

Taylor had played Vessel of Joy in the student Wind Ensemble, but after analyzing the piece through the independent study, playing the piece was “a much more enriching experience because now I hear so many new things in the piece,” he said.

“I think about music much more analytically now,” said Butler, who has applied much of what she learned to her songwriting process. “Now I am able to look at works I create from a much more theoretical perspective. I’ve always focused on lyricism in songwriting, but now I think more about the melody and chords while writing.”

Both students said they wouldn’t have gotten to know each other, and as a commercial music major, Butler would not have had the opportunity to get to know Blasko, had it not been for the independent project that pulled all four musicians together.

In addition to presenting at the Lipscomb Student Scholars Symposium, Taylor and Butler will submit their work for the spring 2024 National Conference for Undergraduate Research.

Getting a clue through chemistry

In summer 2022, Anna Froemming, senior biochemistry major from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, worked all summer long as an intern at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s latent fingerprint unit, but those two months only sparked her interest in doing and learning more.

“I saw how they process evidence and the different techniques they use for hard surfaces versus paper, and the like,” said Froemming. “They are always looking at

new ways to process evidence, and while I was there, a new article was published about processing fingerprints on thermal paper (the paper used for receipts). They asked me to experiment with it and see if I could get it to work.”

She did get it to work by combining zinc and nitric acid to produce nitrogen dioxide fumes. The print developed with a reddishbrown color. However, the print is only visible for a couple of minutes, Froemming said.

She left her internship wanting to know more and teamed up with Dr. Brian

Dr. Jenny Snodgrass (left) mentored students Wesley Butler (center) and Caleb Taylor (foreground), who found that analyzing compositions was a boon to their performance and songwriting skills.

Ella Saakian (holding book, center); Emma Salvitti (holding book, left) and Camden Fain (right, foreground) present their findings at the 2023 Student Scholars Symposium.

Cavitt, professor of chemistry, who said: “When a student comes to a professor with a research question, professors need to do all they can to help,” Cavitt said.

The pair tested three ways to make the fingerprint image last longer on the thermal paper: immediately coating the print with a solution of paraffin wax, olive oil or PEG400 which is used in biological applications.

The PEG400 basically washed the print off, said Froemming. The olive oil worked better but left spots on the print, and the paraffin wax worked best, defining the print better and making it visible for up to a week, with some slight fading.

Froemming said she is looking forward to making a difference in the world by helping to solve crime. She pursued additional experiments this past spring because “I just feel passionate about it. I’m not looking to receive anything from it, but I just want to know a way to fix those prints.

“I think this project taught me how to have a broader perspective and to implement things I have learned in

class,” she said. “In class, we learn how metals and acids interact to create new compounds, but seeing it in a real-world application has been really cool. We had to come up with the guide and procedure to do the experiment, so I felt like I was doing something real, not just an assignment.”

Ensuring a firm foundation

Aaron Hardy, senior civil engineering major from Parkersburg, West Virginia, was also interested in attempting a chemistry experiment, even though it went beyond the scope of his civil engineering materials class.

After a class contest to design a new formula for concrete to make it as strong as possible, Hardy developed a curiosity about what science “grounded” the building codes and best practices for civil engineers. He was curious to see if he could expand on the current guidance for what materials can mix with cement but keep the strength of the concrete.

“In engineering we are setting the limits of what we can do according to the design code, so I wondered how those

limits in the building code were set in the first place,” said Hardy.

As a former intern for the Nebraska Department of Transportation, Hardy knew that a common way to test the strength of cement is to stack up blocks of concrete and measure when their strength begins to degrade, he said. But Hardy wanted to see what was going on at the chemical level. He hadn’t been interested in chemistry in high school, but after seeing how the field related directly to his chosen profession of civil engineering, chemistry made more sense to him, he said.

Dr. Todd Lynn, chair of civil engineering, facilitated a team-up with Cavitt to test how the chemicals in three different materials—fly ash, blast furnace slag and fumed silica—react with calcium hydroxide, a byproduct of Portland cement, to create calcium silicate hydrate.

With a doctorate in polymer science and engineering himself, Cavitt was all too happy to help. “In our current society, science has to be multidisciplinary to advance,” said Cavitt. “Using chemistry to answer an engineering question was just natural.”

Hardy chose the three materials, in part, because they are more environmentally sustainable as they are waste by-products and would be more economical than what is used now. Also, the three materials, termed pozzolans, strengthen Portland cement when added in an appropriate amount. How much hydroxide is present after mixing the materials is reflective of how strong the concrete mixture is; more calcium hydroxide indicates a weaker concrete.

“I’m always asking, how can we make this research as usable as possible and as applicable to people in the professional world as possible,” said Hardy.

At the Student Scholars Symposium, Hardy presented his final results indicating that calcium hydroxide production limits the amount of pozzolan

Inspired by her summer internship, Anna Froemming (right) teamed with Dr. Brian Cavitt (left) to find a way to improve a new method for raising fingerprints on receipt paper.

that can replace Portland cement, but civil engineers can use an acid-base titration to determine the optimum amount of replacement pozzolan regardless of the type of pozzolan.

“We can now optimize the use of specific, regional pozzolans in Portland cement to make a better, sustainable building material,” said Cavitt.

Spice it up with nutrition analysis

As a nutrition and dietetics major, Tessa Vander Kamp (’23) was focused on her journey to become a registered dietitian. She found that conducting her own research project was a great way to prepare for the next step, she said.

Through an independent research study with Dr. Tracy Noerper, director of the nutrition master’s program, Vander Kamp learned a great deal about community nutrition services for senior populations, the value of communication, how the research process works at the graduate level and how to pursue external funding for nutrition research.

Vander Kamp and Noerper came together this past school year to implement an idea Noerper had been kicking around to examine the spice and herb content of food in congregate meals prepared for seniors.

The senior population, who obtains meals through community-based sites such as community centers, churches

and senior centers, has not been studied much, nor have the most prevalently used seasonings in such meals, said Noerper. As the elderly begin to lose their taste, they tend to add salt to their meals. Noerper wanted to examine the relationships between use of spices, herbs and sodium in the original recipes to better understand if such meals could potentially be made healthier with less sodium but equivalent flavor using herbs and spices, she said.

Vander Kamp and Noerper contacted hundreds of sites nationwide that provide free meals to seniors through the federally funded Older Americans Act and requested recipes of all their meals served during a specified time period in May 2022. From the sites’ submissions the researchers created a comprehensive database of ingredients used in the recipes. To date, the pair have received about 300 recipes from seven states and nine locations.

The pair’s database could eventually help inform best practices for dietitians at these sites in the use of spices and herbs versus sodium. Preliminary recipe analysis indicates that a variety of herbs and spices are being incorporated in congregate meal recipes with black pepper, thyme and parsley being used most often.

In addition to winning an outstanding presenter honor at the Student Scholars Symposium, Noerper and Vander Kamp submitted the work for consideration for a professional award from the Foundation of the Academy of

Nutrition and Dietetics as well as to the McCormick Spice Institute to apply for funding for open-source publishing.

The path to becoming a scientist

Haley Lewis (’23), molecular biology graduate from Nashville, came to Lipscomb with a specific path she wanted to follow: research.

Inspired as a child by her grandmother’s battle with multiple myeloma, Lewis entered college knowing she wanted to pursue disease research, so she immediately began looking for opportunities. She learned about the College of Pharmacy’s Summer Research Program, involving primarily Pharm.D. students, and was accepted to enter the program as a freshman.

“I fell in love with how involved all the professors are and how really invested they are in students being involved in the research environment,” she said.

Lewis has worked for Dr. Scott Akers, executive director of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Center, for two and a half years to grow human kidney cells in the lab to study the specific proteins in those cells that identify a drug and help excrete it through the urine. Funded through a private

Tessa Vander Kamp (left) and her mentor Dr. Tracy Noerper (right) discuss their research project at the poster session of the Student Scholars Symposium in April.

Haley Lewis

research company called Inotiv, Lewis and Akers are developing methods to detect transporters that help eliminate a drug from the body.

“At Lipscomb, we are developing a standard process to evaluate any new drug developed in the market to understand how it is eliminated from the body, because the more we understand about how drugs are excreted, the better we can understand how to dose the drugs and prevent potential drug interaction with other medications,” said Akers.

Lewis never doubted she wanted to follow the path to a Ph.D., and Akers, who is often tapped as an investigator for various grant-funded projects at Vanderbilt University, had plenty of projects that offered firsthand experience with cell culture to give her an advantage on that journey.

“Being independent in my research and doing hands-on work on my own time is really important to my becoming a scientist one day. So I really wanted a project to do on my own. Part of the reason why I chose Lipscomb was because I knew it would provide research opportunities to me earlier than at a larger university,” said Lewis.

Her experience helped earn her a summer 2022 fellowship at Upstate Medical University where she worked on infectious disease research, looking at proteins in the lungs and their role in bacteriainduced pneumonia. She later presented that work at the St. Jude National Symposium on Undergraduate Research.

Lewis won an outstanding presenter honor at the 2023 Student Scholars Symposium for a presentation on her work at Upstate Medical as well as winning an outstanding poster honor in a previous year for her research at Lipscomb.

Always ask, “What is your why?”

On April 13, these undergraduates came together with 271 other undergraduate students and 28 graduate students, scattered throughout campus locales to share their research methods and results at the annual Student Scholars Symposium.

The event is intended to be empowering for students learning the value of research, said Mhlanga, and it is easy to see the confidence students have developed at the culminating awards ceremony where students gasp in delight upon hearing their names called, high-five their faculty mentors on the way

Artist Bee Bruno (center) poses with friends in front of her work at the gallery viewing of the 2023 Concrete Poetry Exhibition.

Students presented 95 research projects through posters that almost filled the entire circumference of Allen Arena and the Ezell Center lobby.

At the symposium, each of the senior project teams in the engineering college present their work, including the rocket team, shown here.

to the podium, whoop and cheer as their classmates receive recognition.

Each year the event spurs students’ interest in research through a groundbreaking scholar as keynote speaker. This year’s event featured Lipscomb’s Provost Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker, who publishes regularly, including several books and multiple chapters and articles in the areas of media and child development and teaching and learning.

As a researcher herself who has mentored and advised countless students, Shewmaker encouraged the young scholars to think about, “What is your why?... How does this knowledge, how do these skills, how does this piece I’m creating, how does it make an impact?”

Also new this year was “Creating the 2023 Concrete Poetry Exhibition,” a panel discussion and gallery viewing that served as the culminating presentation

for a collaboration between Associate Professor Dr. Jan Harris’ poetry students and Director of the School of Art & Design Rocky Horton’s art students.

Sixteen poetry and art students collaborated to select a poem and create an artwork that brings clarity and movement to the written word. Lipscomb President Dr. Candice McQueen moderated the panel discussion by the students on the process of creative collaboration and how they synthesized poems into artworks.

The concrete art panel embodied the spirits of creativity and interdisciplinary collaboration between students themselves and their faculty mentors that infuse the entire Student Scholars Symposium, said Mhlanga, and the point was not lost on President McQueen.

“This concept of collaboration makes you better,” she said, concluding the concrete art panel. “It can be harder… but it can really push you to be better. I love the way you’ve all described that concept in this unique opportunity, and I hope you’ll take more opportunities to do this.”

Learn more about the Student Scholars Symposium at lipscomb.edu/SSS2023

Students presented the challenges and benefits of artistic collaboration at a special panel session moderated by the university president.

Provost Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker (left) was the keynote speaker for this year’s Student Scholars Symposium.

The Power of Partnership

Every day, Lipscomb students and faculty partner with the nation’s top thought influencers and changemakers to make the world a safer, healthier and more beautiful place.

Collaboration to welcome and heal

There is power in a Post-It Note®. That’s what a group of undergraduates in Dr. Susan Haynes’ Research Methods course learned in fall 2022 when they researched community organizations statewide to overlay new finds with known services for victims of human trafficking throughout the Tennessee geographic area.

Now the data they collected is packing a punch as it is being used by the state of Tennessee to create an interactive online dashboard that allows organizations and individuals to help victims of human trafficking faster and more effectively.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s (TBI) Human Trafficking Task Force contracted Engage Together (engagetogether.com) to help it strengthen its collaboration among services for survivors. Engage Together does that through data, and lots of it, posted on easy-to-navigate, seamlessly connected digital dashboards that organizations and service providers can access to find the best resources available just down the street from their locations.

But to make that happen, Engage Together needs a lot of brains to help collect all that data to make the dashboards as accurate as possible. Lipscomb students got started with Post-It Notes on a projected map.

“People underestimate the power of data,” said Haynes, associate professor in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, who wanted to highlight data-driven solutions to social justice problems in the course. “It was great to have a project that was truly helping people, so they can see that data can be so incredibly powerful.”

In fall 2021, four student interns carried out a beta test reaching out to hundreds of organizations and businesses that worked with vulnerable populations in a specific five-county area to collect information on their services and contact processes. This included everything from

local police departments to homeless shelters, from individual doctors to hotels.

That work was presented to the TBI task force in January 2022, and they gave the go-ahead to take the data collection statewide, which started in July 2022. Engage Together put a few research fellows of their own to work collecting data as well as some social work interns from the University of Memphis. Lipscomb’s contribution was unique in that it dedicated an entire class of students to work together on the project and the skills the students used were direct learning outcomes of the class, said Ashleigh Chapman, a human rights lawyer and founder of Engage Together.

Engage Together initially had a list of about 50 organizations in the state that Engage Together knew provided services to fight or mitigate human trafficking. The Engage Together research fellows then made phone calls to confirm the information plus obtain recommendations of other organizations or individuals they worked with: from church congregations to local lawyers, from volunteer groups to government-funded agencies.

When the fellows pivoted to survey distribution, the baton was tossed to Lipscomb students, who did their own research online to identify even more service providers, paying special attention to the geography of the providers to note which counties needed extra attention.

Students’ social media and online knowledge came in handy for finding new partners that Engage Together didn’t know about, said Haynes, “We really take a multi-sector approach that

wildly increases the number of organizations we know about,” said Chapman. “Dr. Haynes’ students helped us unearth hundreds of organizations within the service continuum, from prevention to intervention to care, and more. They helped us dig deep.”

Engage Together is compiling more than 3,000 organizations across the state into its userfriendly online dashboards. The students’ work was part of the final project presented to the TBI earlier this year. The work of the TBI task force could lead to reformed laws, better care and services provided for victims and survivors, and strengthened partnerships across the state, said Chapman.

Haynes, Chapman and Lipscomb’s undergraduates put their passion into those PostIt Notes, and now they can see it saving lives.

Mending Rainbows with Meharry

Last year when Dr. Sam MacMaster at Meharry Medical College’s Lloyd C. Elam Mental Health Center wanted to apply for a federal grant to create a program providing comprehensive continuum of care for pregnant women with opioid use disorder, there was one person he knew he wanted involved in the new venture.

Dr. Cayce Watson (’99), associate professor in Lipscomb’s social work program, had already served as the research coordinator for one of the first international clinical trials to determine the

Dr. Susan Haynes (left) and students contributed to a state effort to map resources to combat human trafficking.

safety of medication-assisted recovery for pregnant women with opioid use disorder. She took on the role for the five-year study at the Vanderbilt University Department of Addiction Medicine Research in 2005.

That experience made her uniquely qualified to help shape Meharry’s new Mending Rainbows program from the ground up in 2023. She was recruited as a subject matter consultant to the program, which was successfully funded for $2.6 million through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Mending Rainbows brings together Meharry with two local nonprofits—My Father’s House and Mending Hearts—to provide seamless wraparound care for women from initial health care to assistance with personal housing and job hunting.

Watson, who brings more than 20 years of experience as a social worker specializing in pregnant women with substance use disorders, is providing staff training, data analysis, program development and policy recommendations.

Specifically, Watson is helping the staff provide trauma-informed care, she said. This population is highly stigmatized, said Watson, so it’s important for care workers to see past the stigma and know that many of the women they serve have a significant trauma history.

“Our system of care is oftentimes primed for retraumatization. Promoting safety,

collaboration and choice is critical when serving this population through a traumainformed lens,” said Watson.

Watson published an article on the ethical and spiritual implications for serving this population in the journal Social Work and Christianity, and has worked with Lipscomb’s social work students to develop an anti-stigma campaign for this population.

As part of their senior practicum hours in the field, Lipscomb students and Watson have worked together to develop capstone research projects related to these complex social problems such as best practices for working with substance exposed infants, health equity and food insecurity in minoritized populations and addressing systemic barriers to reporting interpersonal violence and protecting survivors.

Lipscomb will place social work students in a practicum and an internship with Mending Hearts in the upcoming academic year. The organization’s clinical director, Yolanda Maness (BSW ’15, MS ’19) will supervise the students and is also working on the Mending Rainbows grant.

Pharmacy tests drugs to treat heart arrhythmias

Lipscomb’s Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Center for drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics continues to work with collaborators across the nation to accelerate

drug molecules through preclinical and clinical stages of drug development.

As a spin-off from past work funded through grants from the American Heart Association, Lipscomb’s Dr. Scott Akers, executive director of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Center and associate dean of research, and his student assistant Anne Carlisle, a third-year pharmacy student, are currently working on a study of a compound, or drug, to treat heart arrhythmias alongside Northwestern University and Vanderbilt University.

Northwestern came up with a model for testing the drug, called 2-hydroxylbenzamine (2HOBA), to treat arrhythmias using an animal study. Dr. Kathy Murray at Vanderbilt and Dr. Rishi Arora at Northwestern were working together to understand how 2HOBA works by studying tissues and cells from an animal model that develops the heart arrhythmia.

The three universities’ research interests aligned under one grant, and today Akers and Carlisle are analyzing the pharmacokinetics of the drug, or how the body processes the compound, in order to determine the appropriate dosage for optimum effectiveness.

Carlisle, who is part of the LipscombVanderbilt Pharm.D.-to-Ph.D. pathway program, has been working with Akers on the project for a year and a half. From her experience working as the clinical research coordinator for phase one clinical trials at the University of Wisconsin Madison before coming to Lipscomb, she knew the training pathway was for her.

“Northwestern sends us blood samples, and we analyze those to see how much of the drug was in the animal at different time points,” she said. “We’re working to make sure the time it takes for the drug to travel through the body is within a therapeutic range, so we can figure out how to dose the drug to prevent or treat heart arrhythmia.”

Carlisle said that while she is eager to continue working with cancer drugs in her professional career, the heart arrhythmia project has been “beneficial to see the pre-

Pharmacy student Anne Carlisle (left) and Dr. Scott Akers (right) are part of a research partnership with Northwestern and Vanderbilt universities.

clinical aspect of a study and the challenges that come with it.”

Lispcomb’s subaward for the project was $25,000, and all of the data collected will hopefully support a new drug application reviewed by the Federal Drug Administration when the drug is ready to be reviewed for use in humans, said Akers. Data from this study is being developed as an original research manuscript and they hope to submit the study for publication this year.

Bringing new creativity to an age old tradition

A partnership between Lipscomb’s Dr. Ben Blasko, assistant professor and director of instrumental studies, and songwriter and producer Tommee Profitt brought a special gift for nine students in the School of Music at Christmas time: a chance to hear their own orchestral arrangements performed live by established artists such as Fleurie, Crowder, Colton Dixon, Rachel Lampa and Jordan Smith.

Profitt’s The Birth of a King live concert in Nashville on Dec. 6, featured the work of the students who collaborated with Blasko to research and compose orchestral arrangements of 17 songs originally included on Profitt’s 2020 Birth of a King Christmas album.

The Dove Award-winning Profitt, whose music has been heard on 24, Quantico and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, and elsewhere, created a live, staged version of his Christmas album with guest artists, a 50-person orchestra and a 100-person choir.

To arrange the original music for an orchestra, Profitt turned to Blasko, who has conducted groups such as the Nashville

Symphony, Boston Symphony, the North Texas Wind Symphony and the Agora Brass Ensemble.

Blasko recruited composing students to help research, analyze and rearrange the songs for an orchestra. Luke Snyder (BA ’23); Vincent Reed, senior; Kaleb Clarke, senior; Tyler Skrove, junior; Brett Boyd (BS ’22); Jonathan Morris, senior; Tyler Lewis, junior; Kennoniah Bellile (BM ’22) and Janelle Spiers (BA ’22) worked from July to December, investing more than 600 hours of study and work on the project.

The students had to use creativity in thinking about what instruments were not originally included and how new ones could be incorporated into the music to best effect and still be playable for the musicians. One example of the students’ creative process was the arrangement for “God Rest Ye Merry

Gentlemen,” which Profitt envisioned as having the epic, over-the-top tone of the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. The soloist for that piece was Tino Guo, a musician who plays the electric cello and is well known within the film music community.

“I had to think about how to capture epic,” said Blasko. “I spent a lot of time listening to the version (Profitt) created and the Pirates soundtrack. We thought a lot about brass instruments and the power they bring to a piece and about strings, which are versatile, active and bring a swashbuckling feel. Plus you also have to stay out of the way of the sound of the electric cello. The end result was really special.”

See more about these academic collaborations at lipscomb.edu/partnerships.

The work of Dr. Ben Blasko and his music composition students resulted in new orchestral arrangements for music producer Tommee Proffitt ’s Birth of a King holiday concert.

“IT WAS GREAT TO HAVE A PROJECT THAT WAS TRULY HELPING PEOPLE, SO THEY CAN SEE THAT DATA CAN BE SO INCREDIBLY POWERFUL.”

— Dr. Susan Haynes, associate professor

Lipscomb University’s undergraduate and graduate students not only have the opportunity to discover new knowledge with their own two hands, they also have the opportunity to share that new knowledge with scholars across the nation. Check out this selection of locations where students* presented on topics ranging from Iron Age Israel to pneumonia.

*Numbers on the map reflect the number of students who presented at that location and correspond to the detailed information on p. 23

Denver, Colorado

Sigma Tau Delta National Convention

Department of English & Foreign Languages, March 2023

Anna Adams

Peyton Anderson

Alisa Chirkova-Holland (Scholarly Paper Winner)

Grace Dotson

Cassidy Fesmire

Shelby Hallett

Martha Harris

Lauren Kells

Austin Mitchell

Ashlynn Perry

Rachel Randolph

Leah Rice

Grace Richardson

Addy Sigmon

Noah Stump

Germeen Tanas

Emma Visker

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society

Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, October 2022

Mentors: Dr. Matt Vergne, Dr. Brian Cavitt, Dr. Kent Clinger

David Sakov

Lindsey Reynolds

Alexus Brown

Joseph Helmy

Sidney Hinson

Antonious Mikaeel

Joy Opischuk

Meti Regaa

David Saakian

Angie Sarcona

Kierolles Shehata

Santa Barbara, California

International Research Society for Children’s Literature Congress: Ecologies of Childhood

College of Education, August 2023

Mentor: Dr. Jeanne Fain

Ella Saakian

Emma Salvitti

Camden Fain

“Examining Key Aspects of the Environment in Immigration Stories through Visual Analysis in Picture Books.”

We’re going places:

Greeneville, South Carolina

Southeast American College of Sports Medicine Conference

Department of Kinesiology, Spring 2022

Mentor: Dr. Laurel Littlefield

Madi Colson

“Comparison of Post-Exercise Hypotensive Responses to Acute Isovolumetric Strength- and EnduranceBased Resistance Exercise.”

Minneapolis, Minnesota

ASEE Annual Conference

College of Engineering, June 2022

Mentor: Dr. Kirsten Dodson (BS ’12)

Courtney Deckard

Memphis, Tennessee

St. Jude National Symposium on Undergraduate Research

Department of Biology, October 2022

Mentor: Dr. Beth Conway (former Lipscomb faculty)

Mirna Mina Abouda

Andrew Stai

Lily Dao

Reed Haga

Caleb Obregon

Misal Zaki

“Neprilysin Regulates the PI3K Pathway in Triple Negative Breast Cancer.”

St. Jude National Symposium on Undergraduate Research

Department of Biology, October 2022

Mentor: Dr. Guirong Wang (SUNY Upstate Medical University)

Haley Lewis

“The Role of SP-B Peptides in BacterialInduced Pneumonia.”

Little Rock, Arkansas

TriBeta National Conference

Department of Biology, March 2022

Mentor: Dr. Bonny Millimaki

Tabbitha Newman

“The Effects of Topoisomerase II Inhibition with Hu331 or Cannibidiol on Embryonic Cell Death in Zebrafish.”

Isabella Gaona

“The role of Topoisomerase 2 in Zebrafish Behavior and Neural Development.”

Nashville, Tennessee, and Virtual

Tennessee Interprofessional Practice and Education Consortium Annual Conference (virtual)

Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, July 2022

Mentors: Dr. Abigail Burka, Dr. Chad Gentry

Elizabeth Pendergrass

M. Ally White

Marleigh Deitz

“Equipping Student Pharmacists for Diverse Populations and Interprofessional Care.”

Tennessee Association for Gifted Children Conference at Fisk University College of Education, October 2022

Mentor: Dr. Emily Mofield

Emily Graves

Amber Whiting

Chelsea England

“Using Stretch Prompts as Scaffolds for Rigor.”

NINE Online conference (virtual)

Department of Nutrition, September 2022

Mentor: Dr. Autumn Marshall (BS ’92)

Logan Van Treeck

“Baseball: Mindful Preparation or Superstitious Habits?”

Elise Shewmaker

“Fueling Collegiate Softball: Encouraging Nutritious Habits for Body Composition and Performance Gains.”

Tennessee Academy of Science

Department of Biology, November 2022

Mentor: Dr. Bonny Millimaki

Tabbitha Newman

“The Effect of Topoisomerase II Inhibition with Hu-331 or Cannabidiol on Embryonic Cell Death in Zebrafish.”

Isabella Gaona

Nevaeh Stoudermire

“Topoisomerase II Affects Zebrafish Behavior and Neural Organization.”

Washington D.C.

Pediatric Academic Societies

Department of Biology, April 2023

Mentor: Dr. Scott Guthrie M.D. (Lipscomb Ward Society Member)

Kaylee Grace Wu

“Using Neonatal Airway Simulators to Teach Surfactant Administration through Laryngeal or Supraglottic Airways in Indian NICUs.”

Boston, Massachusetts

American Society of Overseas Research Annual Meetings

Lanier Center for Archaeology, November 2022

Mentor: Dr. Steven Ortiz, Dr. Mark Janzen

Bruno Soltic

“Archaeology of Yahweh, Temple Orientation in Iron Age II Judah and Israel.”

Terrence J. Nichols

“To Be or Not To Be... A Digital Archaeologist. That is the Question.”

American Society for Nutrition

Department of Kinesiology, July 2023

Mentor: Laurel Littlefield

Grace Zimmerman

“The Effects of Vigorous Intensity Exercise and Dietary Manipulation on Substrate Oxidation in the Postprandial Period.”

Atlanta, Georgia

American Academy of Religion Southeast Region Conference

Lanier Center for Archaeology, March 2023

Mentor: Dr. Steven Ortiz

Marcella Barbosa

“Tel Burna: Recent Work and the 2022 Season.”

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ J.S. Ward Society awards top health science students with

fellowships and scholarships

Each year, Lipscomb’s J.S. Ward Society awards students involved in health science study and research with fellowships and scholarships intended to advance their future careers in medicine or health science professions or researchs.

The Langford-Yates Fellows and Ward Fellows are afforded valuable opportunities to carry out hands-on research both at Lipscomb and elsewhere, and the LaVelle Scholars and Ward Scholars are awarded resources to continue their study and nurture their journey to becoming health care professionals.

The J.S. Ward Society is composed of alumni in the fields of science, those who have chosen a health science career, and Lipscomb friends passionate about the health sciences. The purpose of the society is to connect university science alumni and friends to make a Lipscomb pre-professional health science education accessible to current and future students.

Langford-Yates Summer Fellowship Program

This fellowship was established in honor of former Lipscomb science faculty members Dr. Paul Langford and Dr. H. Oliver Yates to support undergraduate research in the sciences. Fellowships are awarded to select science students with outstanding research proposals. The fellowships allow recipients to stay on campus over the summer and engage in research with a faculty mentor.

Paul Agaiby, biology major, and Dr. Kyle Brawner, associate professor of biology, will study “Investigating the Potential Effect of the Opportunistic Pathogen Cronobacter sakazakii on Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor: Implications for Necrotizing Enterocolitis.”

Dr. Stephen Opoku-Duah, chair of the chemistry department, will study “Heavy Metal Detection in Middle Tennessee Water Bodies Using Inductively Coupled Plasma–Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES)” with Tony Khalil, biology major, and will study “Removal of Cyanotoxins from Drinking Water Sources Using Copper Sulfate and Sodium Peroxyhydrate (PAK27) Compounds” with Kenneth Klutse, biochemistry and professional chemistry major.

Antouious Mikaael, applied biochemistry major, will study “Isolation and Characterization of 6-His Tagged FimH, and E. coli Adhesin Protein” with Dr. Brian Cavitt, professor of chemistry.

The Herman G. LaVelle Scholars Program

This program honors the life and legacy of Dr. Herman G. LaVelle, who was the first member of his family to attend college and medical school. The purpose of the LaVelle Scholars program is to assist qualified pre-health professions students who demonstrate financial need with application and testing expenses associated with gaining admission to health professions schools.

• Paul Agaiby, biology

• Jafar Aljorani, bioscience, philosophy and molecular biology

• Mark Habeb, molecular biology

• A.J. Hilliard, neurobiology

• Timothy Khalil, biology

• Toby Renfrow, biology

• Mariam Shalaby, biology

• Dionne Trammell, molecular biology

The J.S. Ward Society Research Fellowship

The Ward Society Fellowship allows pre-health students to conduct undergraduate research in the summer at an off-campus location. Undergraduate research is a highimpact educational practice that is transformative; students gain skills that prepare them for success in their current and future programs.

Three of the fellows were selected for the nationally competitive Vanderbilt Undergraduate Clinical Research Internship Program (UCRIP), where they are matched with a physician and with a research mentor. They participate in medical rounds and are assigned a research project in one of a wide array of different specialties.

These three are Joseph Helmy, biology major; Ellie Kowitz, molecular biology major; and Eric Schall, neurobiology major.

One of the fellows, Timothy Khalil, molecular biology, was placed with Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Eric Grogan (’95) in applied research in pulmonology.

Two of the Ward Research Fellows—Abby Powell, bioscience and philosophy, and Carolyn Tran, molecular biology—are conducting research at Meharry Medical College. Powell is working with Dr. Amos Sakwe. Tran is working with Dr. Jermaine Davis.

The J.S. Ward Society Scholarship

The Ward Scholarship is a prestigious award given to outstanding students who are planning a health science career and have excelled in and outside of the classroom. Recipients of the Ward Society Scholarship are students of character and integrity.

All four plan to enter the medical or health care fields upon graduation.

Easton Ball, a piano performance major with minors in biology and chemistry, from Cosby, Tennessee.

Julianna Dilbert, biology major, from Ellicott City, Maryland.

Timothy Khalil, molecular biology major, from Nolensville, Tennessee.

Mena Shawky, biology major, from Nashville.

“Lipscomb has prepared me for not only a successful career in the medical field, but also a flourishing life. The opportunity to be a Ward Scholar truly demonstrates the investment that faculty, donors and alumni have impressed upon me,” said Dilbert.

“As my junior year comes to a close, I can genuinely say that I have a genuine admiration for the Lipscomb biology department,” said Shawky, “which taught me what a great leader looks like and how to be one.”

Learn More about the J. S. Ward Society at lipscomb.edu/WardSociety

2023 Langford-Yates Fellows

2023 LaVelle Scholars

2023 Ward Research Fellows

2023 Ward Scholars

The maven of music theory in Music City

Dr. Jenny Snodgrass brings research expertise and passion for students to the School of Music.

The dean of the George Shinn College of Entertainment & the Arts (CEA) likes to say that Dr. Jenny Snodgrass “sees things that are good and works to make them great.” That has certainly been the case in the personal life of Lipscomb’s new academic director for the School of Music.

As an opera singer who has studied the form since she was seven years old, Snodgrass turned a stint on vocal rest after an injury at the age of 21 into an academic career that has produced awards, grants, textbooks used at Juilliard and Eastman schools of music and a quarterfinal finish for the Grammy Foundation Music Educator Award.

“This school is about to turn up to 11!” she gushes about Lipscomb’s School of Music, which has grown from 35 to 150 majors over the last six years and has produced students who have been called on to perform with famed tenor Andrea Bocelli, orchestrator and musician Cody Fry and headliner Colton Dixon.

“It’s something to be in a school where people have Grammys and are out doing amazing things,” she said.

Snodgrass came on board at Lipscomb in fall 2022 and has already jumped into teaching music theory courses, a presentation of “Musicianship on Music Row,” her new chapter in the forthcoming

Oxford Handbook for Public Music Theory; a oneon-one music analysis project with two music students (one classical and one commercial), and the transition of the open source academic journal she edits, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy Online, to Lipscomb’s digital platform (see page 5).

As a 17-year, tenured professor at Appalachian State University with three textbooks, Outstanding Professor and Outstanding Teacher awards and studies involving both pedagogical and theoretical research published in numerous journals, she was an obvious choice to bring her “good to great” attitude and apply it to research in the CEA.

“I think sometimes research in the arts is kind of confusing because it’s not necessarily a book. It can be an article or a conference presentation, but it can also be the research that you do to direct the show or to produce a film or to get a recital together,” said Snodgrass, who has been appointed to Lipscomb’s University Research Council. “Every single decision we make is based on understanding cultural context in history.”

While a costume designer may need to understand the culture and time period of the dramatic work or a pianist may need to analyze the musical structure of a piece, as a music theorist, Snodgrass has focused her academic

Dr. Jenny Snodgrass came to Music City to “live in” Nashville studios for

works on bringing her discipline to today’s students in a way that both classical and commercial undergraduate students can relate to.

“This chapter that is coming out in the Oxford Handbook is important to me because it speaks to people about music in a way that welcomes everybody to the table,” she said. “I want to talk about it in a real conversational way. I think we’re at a point in education where students want to know, ‘How do I relate to that?’”

True to form, Snodgrass’ approach to her academic scholarship was forged through taking a good thing and making it great. Around 2009 she was asked to teach theory to Appalachian State music industry students. Dissatisfied with her own application of music theory knowledge to the commercial side of the discipline, she

expressed her desire to do better and was awarded a sabbatical.

She came to Music City to “live in” Nashville studios for a semester. “I listened to how they talked. I watched what they did and listened to how they created. I went to songwriter nights. I sat in with and talked to engineers and interviewed people,” she said.

The result was a book called Contemporary Musicianship, printed by the Oxford University Press and now in its second edition. It is a music theory textbook for both classical and commercial styles and includes interviews discussing how artists, managers and producers use music analysis in their writing, listening or in the field in general.

During that process, she met and interviewed Pat McMakin, who was then a music engineer at Belmont

University and is now lead engineer at Ocean Way. Snodgrass featured him in both the first and second edition of Contemporary Musicianship and recruited him to co-author her latest chapter in the Oxford Handbook. McMakin has come to the Lipscomb campus to co-present with Snodgrass and to speak to students in classes.

As part of her continuing efforts to understand the aural and theory skills that the 21st century musician needs, Snodgrass continually talks with engineers, writers, composers and artists, not only for her own research, she notes, but also for Lipscomb students’ connections for their future careers.

She has plans to involve a team of 10 to 20 students in producing the third edition of Contemporary Musicianship during 2024-2025.

Snodgrass’ scholarly focus is how to integrate commercial (left) and classical (right) music in the classroom. She immediately recognized similar goals within the Lipscomb School of Music.

“When you’re dealing with modern pop, country and Christian music, you’ve got to pay for a lot of copyrights, so this experience will not just be music analysis. It will be about the business of getting copyrights, which every music student should know about,” said Snodgrass.

As a passionate supporter of undergraduate research, Snodgrass advocates providing real-world projects for college students of any age. “Instead of saying, ‘What would it be like?’, let’s really do it. For real,” she said.

Snodgrass repeated her on-site approach in information gathering for her book, Teaching Music Theory: New Voices and Approaches, published by Oxford University Press in 2021. For this book, which is used as a text at Juilliard and Eastman, she traveled to 19 states to watch how people taught music theory.

Even in her new administrative role at Lipscomb, Snodgrass is still teaching music theory courses. “I need to know what’s happening in my students’ lives, because it impacts my research and vice versa,” she said.

In her first semester, two students were so inspired as they learned about music analysis that they launched an independent study with Snodgrass to take a deeper dive into an orchestral work and then present their analysis at the April Student Scholars Symposium (see page 13)

Snodgrass hopes to send Lipscomb undergraduates to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in the future.

“They have such open minds, and they want to understand why and

how something works,” she said of undergraduate students. “These students question everything, and we should say, ‘Let’s take this next step and try to figure out what’s going on here. Let’s dissect it a little bit.’ It also says to them, ‘I know you can handle this.’ Undergraduates are so capable of so many things,” she said.

“Because of the type of school we are, this is a safe place to ask the questions and to get the mentorship to create independent thinkers, who are going to be so productive in society when they ask questions and think of new ideas. Yeah, I love undergrads.”

In addition to her books, Snodgrass has written several academic articles and chapters discussing her specialty topic: how to integrate commercial and classical music together in the classroom, published

in the Oxford Handbook, the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy and the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, among others.

When Lipscomb called, she immediately recognized its School of Music as a place that practices the same blended philosophy. “There’s classical music going on here. There’s commercial music going on here, and both are valued. I knew this was a place where I could thrive,” she said.

And as a bonus: “I don’t have to travel back and forth from Boone, North Carolina, to Nashville anymore!”

Learn more about the Lipscomb School of Music at lipscomb.edu/music

“BECAUSE OF THE TYPE OF SCHOOL WE ARE, THIS IS A SAFE PLACE TO ASK THE QUESTIONS, AND TO GET THE MENTORSHIP TO CREATE INDEPENDENT THINKERS”

Teaching for the world of tomorrow

hroughout the world today are calls to move education beyond standardized tests and formulaic assessments. Today’s thought leaders say that in order to succeed in the working world, new adults must be able to adapt, to collaborate, to apply skills to a new situation, to innovate.

Thus, in order to develop new curricula that go beyond memorization and fact-checking and develop these skills in the next generation, university scholars must also create, adapt, apply and innovate.

Lipscomb’s faculty are answering that call on a daily basis. In 2022-23, professors’ scholarly course development drew from today’s popular trends, encompassed the latest learning research on Gen Z and were grounded in the skills that employers say are most in-demand today.

From the original patterns of famed fashion designers Halston to in-clinic health care collaboration, from using Monopoly® for accounting audits to practicing chemistry to “escape” the lab, innovative scholarship in effective teaching fills Lipscomb’s classrooms and shapes its students.

Halston Collection inspires future fashion trendsetters

In order to become a trendsetting future fashion leader, one would do well to look to the fashion titans of the past who pioneered new trends that now are ever-present.

Lipscomb’s students in the Department of Fashion and Design have the unique opportunity to ground their own future creative innovation in the work of Roy Frowick Halston, an American designer known simply as Halston, who “changed the face of women’s wear as we know it,” said Charlotte Poling, assistant professor in the Department of Fashion and Design

Sissy Simmons , department chair, developed the required course Design Studio with a section on fashion design that allows students to actually hold and analyze Halston’s original patterns and create their own fashion designs inspired by what they can see, touch and analyze in-person.

Such hands-on learning is available thanks to the Lipscomb Halston Collection, an archive of garments, patterns and the business documents of Halston, donated to the university’s fashion merchandising department by Georgette Mosbacher, president and CEO of Borghese Cosmetics in New York City, in 2002.

The collection includes more than 800 watercolor sketches, hundreds of patterns, mood boards, countless business documents and communications, photographs, press clippings and TV broadcasts, as well as more than 60 garments, including a large selection of evening dresses.

“These are original patterns that were literally drawn on; they have been sketched on; you can see Halston’s handwriting on them; there are original markings on them,” said Poling. “A lot of the time they have original swatches that have been pinned on.

(Left) Lipscomb’s fashion students get to actually hold and analyze original patterns and garments, such as the one pictured here, designed by famed American designer Halston. (Right) Students’ designs inspired by Halston patterns were part of an exhibit for Lipscomb Fashion Week in 2021.

Creativity, innovation, real-world experience, application, adaptability.

“Most of the patterns in the collection are couture, specific to one person, such as Liza Minnelli, Kathryn Graham; all the greats that he dressed,” she said.

Halston designed the pillbox hat worn by Jackie Kennedy at President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural in 1961; was the first to use print models in runway shows, a precursor to the “supermodel;” designed for Hollywood celebrities such as Liz Taylor, Lucille Ball, Lauren Bacall and Princess Grace, and was named by Gucci’s Tom Ford and Donna Karan as a major influence on their style.

Fashion students studied the patterns in the classroom and were assigned to either recreate the historical garment or to do a modern adaptation of their own based off of the pattern. For Lipscomb’s fashion week

in fall 2021, fashion, art and history students came together to host an exhibit of selected pieces from the Halston collection as well as the student-designed garments inspired by Halston patterns.

“He had such innovative ways of making patterns and constructing clothes. So this exercise gave students exposure to another way of making patterns, another way of draping fabric,” said Simmons. “It gave them the opportunity to see how even a very simple pattern can be made special through fabric choice and craftsmanship. That’s what made his clothes special.”

Until Halston hit the scene in the 1960s and ’70s, women’s wear was much more structural, fabrics worn close to the body and not necessarily comfortable, Poling said. “His look was soft and drapey, comfortable and

glamorous,” a look that has become common for today’s woman, said Poling.

This spring, Poling took all that she and Simmons have learned about using the collection in the classroom to prepare a proposal about best practices for the Fashion Institute of Technology’s fall conference titled Archiving Fashion Conference: Mapping Fashion Collections. The proposed panel discussion will include a student who was involved in the Design Studio course Halston exercise.

In addition to being what some have called “a national treasure,” Lipscomb’s Halston collection promises to spur years of in-depth study among students in the business of fashion, change-making and market disruption.

Professor taps into students’ desire to ‘escape’ chemistry lab

It’s not uncommon for undergraduates to want to escape their chemistry lab work. At Lipscomb, many students can achieve that goal by finding a missing professor in an abandoned chocolate factory.

The final exam for the Instrumental Methods of Analysis chemistry lab, as well as other chemistry labs each semester, is an hour-long escape-room style exam that tests students’ abilities to employ teamwork and practical application of skills that they have learned over the course of the semester.

The escape room exercise was developed by Dr. Matt Vergne, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Students must find hidden clues and solve puzzles by using analytical instruments in the laboratory, such as a UV−vis spectrophotometer, an FTIR

spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a gas chromatograph−mass spectrometer (GCMS). The “mission” is to identify a mystery ingredient for better tasting candy in order to find instructions on how to escape and find the missing professor. According to student surveys, participants both enjoy the lab and felt it was an effective review of the techniques they had learned, said Vergne. “Most lab practicums are really serious. This one is fun. It emphasizes the knowledge in a fun and engaging way,” said one biology and biochemistry major in 2019.

The approach has not only won rave reviews from students, but it was also published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2019. A revised article on implementation of a virtual escape room designed for remote learning was published in that same journal’s edition focused on teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

The virtual escape room model, which allows participants to remotely access lab instruments in other rooms, was co-written

by Lipscomb chemistry Professor Dr. John Smith and chemistry Assistant Professor Dr. Ryan Bowen (BS ’14).

The published article attracted quite a bit of attention with clicks fueled by five scientific blogs that wrote about the innovative model, said Vergne. In 2022, Vergne was invited to give a presentation on using escape rooms for teaching at the “Fun-tastic Games and How to Make/Use Them” session at the Biennial Conference on Chemistry Education, attended by hundreds of chemistry professors from across the nation.

“Over the past two years, I’ve worked with Dr. Sarah Collier, and Dr. Sarah Graff, both assistant professors in pharmaceutical sciences, to develop an escape room exercise for microbiology and immunology classes in the College of Pharmacy. We surveyed the students and they thought that they learned a lot in the escape room lab and enjoyed it. We are collecting and analyzing survey data with plans to publish that data as well.”

Dr. Matt Vergne uses an hour-long escape room exercise as his final exam in the Instrumental Methods of Analysis laboratory course.

Students take their auditing skills straight to Boardwalk

Dr. Perry Moore (BS ’81), the Charles E. Frasier Chair of Accountancy, sends his Master of Accountancy graduates off to Boardwalk each year with the skills they need to understand auditing in the real world, thanks to the fictional world of Monopoly®. Moore’s simulation, which he has used in his classes for eight years, uses the Hasbro game Monopoly and requires students to ‘record’ their rolls as if they were actual business events. Moore developed a customized Excel file to record the rolls and thus produce the students’ set of financial statements. Paper receipts are given when cash changes hands.

When time is called, students get their records in order. They are then audited by another student, who has to interview them, go through their records, determine whether the financial statements accurately reflect what transpired and issue an audit opinion on the financial statements.

“They learn how to examine the records, propose adjustments where warranted and communicate the results of their work to others,” said Moore.

“This simulation provides a concrete example of what certain aspects of auditing look like in practice and makes it easier to conceptualize carrying out various auditing tasks,” said Moore. “In a later presentation exercise, numerous students have referred to situations that come up during the Monopoly simulation to demonstrate auditing techniques or methods.”

Perry was awarded the Mark Chain/ FSA Innovation in Graduate Teaching Award by the Association for International Certified Professional Accountants for the exercise. In addition to receiving a monetary prize, Moore demonstrated the strategy at a special session of the American Accounting Association Conference on Teaching and Learning in Accounting in San Diego, California, in July 2022.

“Auditing professors struggle to identify realistic instructional tools that have students complete actual auditing tasks. Several publicly available tools exist, but most appear contrived or based on artificial situations,” said Moore. “Igniting student interest in such tools can be challenging because of the perceived lack of real-world application. Other professors have developed simulations based on Monopoly, but none have extended their work to auditing.”

Dr. Perry Moore’s graduate accounting students play Monopoly to learn auditing skills. Alumni come to campus to serve as the banker on game day.

Interprofessional program produces change-making health care providers

From 2010 to today, 24 Lipscomb College of Pharmacy students per year have had the opportunity to join medical, nurse practitioner and counseling students from Vanderbilt University and social work students from the University of Tennessee to treat real-world patients as an interprofessional team.

The Vanderbilt Program in Interprofessional Learning (VPIL) places each team in local health care facilities to care for patients in areas of pediatrics, neurology, cardiology, acute walk-in care and emergency care, among others, for two years’ time.

The long time period, interprofessional format and the hands-on work with patients makes the VPIL program a unique experience for Nashville’s health care students, but until the last couple of years, the VPIL partners had not done an analysis of the program’s overall effectiveness.

Dr. Allison Provine, associate professor of pharmacy practice, and Lipscomb’s VPIL coordinator, stepped up to the plate and began collecting data in 2019.

In the second year of the program, VPIL participants collaborate to develop

a specific quality improvement project (QIP) drawn from their interprofessional observations throughout the first year of the program. An on-site preceptor and faculty mentor are assigned to guide the team and ensure the project will improve patient care. The most popular types of QIPs that teams chose aimed to improve clinic processes or provide patient education, Provine said.

She analyzed all 69 QIPs completed from 2012 to 2019, surveying the preceptors, noting which projects continued to be used years later and documenting their impact on future VPIL participants and patients. Provine and the VPIL team concluded that interprofessional teams can successfully implement quality improvement that is clinically meaningful.

“The whole team has a common goal and that focus proved to be a positive factor. Students are often gung ho to change the world right away, but change makers also have to get buy-in from clinic staff. This was one of the few experiential programs provided students with the skills to understand how to make change within the challenging health care environment.

“Working with a team on a common goal like this and seeing the barriers can be just as teachable as having positive clinical results,” said Provine. “It’s hard to change the health care system. This program helps

them see the barriers and shows students how much work and collaboration it takes to get stuff done in health care.”

Provine was lead author of a paper on the VPIL program’s effectiveness published in the Journal of Interprofessional Care in 2022. She also made poster presentations on her findings at the Lipscomb and Vanderbilt faculty research days. Student participants have also presented on their VPIL experience at academic conferences. The VPIL program will enter a restructuring year in 2023-2024, so Provine is now collecting general feedback on how VPIL helped Lipscomb graduates with residency and job placement. Participant comments have been positive, especially about how the presentation and communication skills developed really “set them apart” in job interviews, and all 11 Lipscomb VPIL participants who graduated in spring 2022 received residency and a fellowship placements, said Provine.

Lipscomb’s ultimate goal for the future is to have all of its health science students participate in interprofessional and multi-university teams, coordinated by Lipscomb, she said.

These Lipscomb students participated in VPIL in 2015, one of the years included within Dr. Allison Provine ’s longitudinal study of the program’s teaching effectiveness.

Summer Grant Awardees

Each year, Lipscomb University awards up to six grants to allow faculty to focus on research and scholarship during the summer. Past grants have benefitted the development of new courses, the writing of books and poetry, innovative research in chemistry and biology, and programs to enhance Lipscomb’s relationship within the national and international community.

In 2023, five faculty were awarded grants to conduct projects adding to humanity’s knowledge base in aerodynamics, theological discernment, humor in art, telemedicine and through historical fiction.

Dr. Josh Strahan (’04)

Associate Professor of Bible

“Humble Discernment ”

With an eye toward encouraging civil discourse born out of love and grace in our society today, Strahan’s goal is to write a book that would first introduce a model for theological discernment and secondly, apply the method to a handful of topics, from ethics to metaphysics, polarizing society today.

“It is obvious that we find ourselves in a time of increasing polarization. Sadly, too many lifelong Christians fail to model an alternative to such divisive styles of communication,” said Strahan. “I suspect that many Christians have never been given a useful framework for navigating complicated issues. When asked for their reasoning, they often have little to appeal to beyond platitudes and proof-texts, all of which leads to confusion, frustration and talking past one another.”

To counter this, Strahan’s book would model a better approach: a system of checks and balances that draws on basic Christian orthodoxy—worldview, Bible, love, virtue and natural revelation.

“All five elements—Worldview, Bible, Love, Virtue, Natural Revelation—have their place in Christian orthodoxy. To attempt to live as a Christian or to do Christian discernment apart from any one of them is to do something less than Christian,” said Strahan.

Read more about Strahan and his first book The Basics of Christian Belief

Dr. Max David Collao (’09)

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering

“Wind Tunnel Wall Forming Using Information from CFD Simulation and Experimental Data”

Lipscomb University’s low-speed wind tunnel is an important asset to the College of Engineering for the purposes of research, product design and development, and engineering training. With its adaptive walls, it is a useful tool to model real-world situations in which road vehicles or aircraft are not surrounded by “enclosing walls.”

Collao’s goal is to use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to predict air flow behavior instead of solely relying on analog gauge measurements of flow properties. Such analog measurements involve adjusting the tunnel’s walls over and over in response to data, making it a repetitive and very time-consuming part of the experimental work.

“CFD is a powerful tool that can be used to obtain approximate information about the possible paths of streamlines prior to performing any experimental work,” said Collao. “Starting experimental work using this information can dramatically reduce the time necessary to create suitable conditions for experiments and has the potential for saving other precious resources such as money, physical effort and electric power.”

This work would serve as a learning opportunity of aerodynamic testing for both engineering faculty and students using a wind tunnel and simulation software, and students will gain a mentoring experience providing a head start in launching their professional careers.

Lipscomb funds summer research to advance spiritual discernment, the visual arts, creative writing, engineering and telehealth

Dr. Dana Chamblee Carpenter Assistant Professor of English

“Development of the Novel: Hiram Lucky’s Home for the Unfortunate”

Carpenter will spend the summer conducting extensive research for a new historical fiction book: Hiram Lucky’s Home for the Unfortunate. This creative writing project is a multi-voiced novel that spans the lives of the Lucky family from just after the Civil War to the 1920s.

The story begins with the family patriarch, a tycoon who makes his money from the timber boom and expansion of the Cotton Belt railroad near the St. Francis River in Northeast Arkansas. Carpenter will travel to St. Francis, Arkansas, and its environs to immerse herself in the stories of the time and place through research, especially of archival holdings in various local libraries and preservation organizations.

“This novel will highlight voices in a place and period that are often overlooked in conventional historical fiction. Underlying themes would explore the consequences of rapid consumption of natural resources on the environment as much of Northeast Arkansas suffered irrevocable damage from clear-cutting and the decimation of native species of plants and animals, as well as the human suffering left in the wake of the Industrial Revolution’s ‘grab and run’ modus operandi,” said Carpenter.

“The story is, at its heart, about people looking for a place to belong, to pick up the pieces of their lives, and to find a purpose for living through acts of kindness for others.”

Learn more about Carpenter’s previously published historical fiction series The Bohemian Trilogy.

Rocky Horton, MFA, MBA

Director of the School of Art & Design

“Development of a Course on Humor in Art”

Horton will work to develop a course, with associated lecture series and exhibition, on humor in art, in collaboration with Dr. Thomas Sturgill, the professor of sculpture at Belmont University. The professors plan to offer the class at both institutions with some co-events, lectureships, art exhibitions and class sessions.

His summer research, including traveling to exhibitions and museums of both comedy and art, will concentrate on comic processes and comedy history and its manifestation in the work of preeminent artists throughout time.

“Art and humor have been companions for centuries,” said Horton, citing Bernini’s Fountain in the Piazza Navona and Michelangelo’s self-portrait as the sagging skin of St. Bartholomew as two examples of thousands in art history.

“However, there is little scholarship dedicated to the subject and few exhibitions. The lecture series will include professional artists and comedians talking about the processes of both, and ultimately, this will lay the groundwork for future collaborations between Lipscomb’s School of Art and Design and other institutions nationwide.”

Dr. Rebecca Burcham Chair of Management, Entrepreneurship & Marketing

“Telehealth, Telemedicine, eHealth—What Do Patients Call It?”

Burcham’s project will focus on improving and increasing use of telemedicine by first understanding what terms (e. g. telemedicine, telehealth, e-health, digital health and remote care) patients and physicians use and how they define these terms.

Although the concept of telemedicine has been around for more than a decade, confusion around terms and definitions used to describe these remote services persists. Clarity around the terms is a critical exploratory step in identifying ways to improve the use of such services, said Burcham.

In fact, the American Telemedicine Association has made a national call for action for academic research into all aspects of telemedicine as the growth of this industry is imperative to help fill the growing gap in health care services plaguing rural America.

The decision by the state of Tennessee to opt out of accepting federal dollars to expand Medicaid directly led to the closure of many rural hospitals across the state. Such closures result in health care providers relocating to other hospitals for employment, leaving many patients in these communities tens, if not hundreds, of miles away from in-person health care.

Telemedicine services have, in some cases, been able to fill the gap in care for these communities, said Burcham. However, confusion arises about the term telemedicine as many words and definitions abound to describe the delivery of health care beyond the face-to-face interaction via platforms such as email, audio, visual, synchronous and asynchronous.

Learn more about Lipscomb’s summer research grant winners of the past at lipscomb.edu/SummerGrants

Getting back to basics

Getting back to basics

Philosopher J. Caleb Clanton builds foundational knowledge on morality.

Few would describe Lipscomb’s resident professor of philosophy, who holds two graduate degrees in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, as basic, but Clanton says that the “office of a philosopher” is essentially all about the basics.

“We like to talk about ethics mattering in this society, but so little of the time do we stop and think about where those ethics came from,” he said. “As a philosopher, I am committed to addressing some very basic questions.” Such as, “Is God real?” or “What makes something right or wrong?”

In fact, just by looking at Clanton’s prolific writing and editing career, including nine books in print, one can see his philosophical scholarship spiraling in from broad societal issues of behavior to the ever more basic questions that undergird that behavior: from values to religious beliefs to morals.

His first books in 2008 and 2009 were Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square and The Ethics of Citizenship: Liberal Democracy and Religious Convictions

He then turned his pen toward a closer look at religion with: The Classical American Pragmatists and Religion; Restoration and Philosophy: New Philosophical Engagements with the Stone-Campbell Tradition; Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition; and The Philosophy of Religion of Alexander Campbell, which won the Lester McAllister Prize.

In 2021 he co-edited the textbook Great Ideas in History, Politics, and Philosophy, with fellow Lipscomb Professor Dr. Richard C. Goode (BA ’82). The book is a streamlined compendium of the seminal passages from some of the most important texts in human history that have influenced and enriched human experience. The textbook is used today in Lipscomb’s general education curriculum.

Then going deeper into the foundations of ethics, in 2022 he published Nature and Command: On the Metaphysical Foundations of Morality, and a few months later he released God and Morality in Christian Traditions: New Essays on Christian Moral Philosophy (see page 40). Both of these books were published with Clanton’s longtime co-author Dr. Kraig Martin of Harding University.

“A few years ago I said to myself, I only want to research topics that matter to me a great deal,” said Clanton on his progression to writing about the presuppositions that shape our view of morality today.

“How do I teach an ethics class or a moral philosophy class if I haven’t thought through these things myself. Otherwise I run the risk of leading my students down the wrong path. I am trying to teach them to think through these questions themselves in light of the best reasons. I can help them in that discernment process, but only if I have invested myself in trying to discern the truth on the front end.”

Philosophy is not a common topic for the bestseller list, but his latest book, God and Morality, was spawned by a strong popular demand within the scholarly community. Clanton and Martin were asked to guest edit a special edition of the journal Religions The special issue “God, Ethics and Christian Traditions” has been downloaded about 25,000 times worldwide. So the authors decided to release the content as a book.

“We invited some of the leading philosophers in the nation to reflect on God and morality, such as C. Stephen Evans, Daniel Bonevac and Francis Beckwith, among others. These are some wonderful thinkers… Christians from across denominations—

some were Reformed, others Evangelical, Pentecostal or Catholic—all reflecting on the relationship between God and morality,” said Clanton. “This book offers a fine display of the work that philosophers can do. It gives lie to the claim that philosophers’ work isn’t really being looked at.”

His 2022 book, Nature and Command, laid the foundation for much of his work to come, as it laid out the central contention about the relationship between God and how moral obligations arise. Since at least the time of

goes on to develop and defend a theory that combines these two views—a metaethical approach that has not yet received much scholarly attention, said Clanton.

“No one has really explored a combination theory in recent years. We think this is a position that is a decidedly Christian account. So we asked ‘What if we tried, in the theme of the Stone-Campbell tradition, to unify those threads,’” said Clanton. “This kind of work is important, because it’s stepping back from the whole and looking at the stability of our foundations. There is an important role for philosophers in Christian universities.”

Nature and Command is part of a larger project to one day explain other elements of ethics and character that would follow downstream from its philosophical foundations, said Clanton. In fact, Clanton and Martin already have a contract for a book to do The Good and the Right: A Christian Introduction to Moral Philosophy—but it could be some years before that book materializes,

In the meantime, Clanton is busy as a research fellow at the Abilene Christian University Center for Restoration Studies. In November, he presented “What are the Philosophical Foundations of Morality? (And Does the Stone-Campbell Tradition Have Anything Unique to Say about Them?)” at the

natural law theory explains morality by appealing to facts about human nature—facts that God is responsible for. Secondly, divine command theory holds that moral obligations arise directly from God’s commands or some other prescriptive act of the divine will. Clanton and Martin provided an accessible analysis of these traditional views, reconstructed the various arguments for and against them, and offered an extended consideration of the historical emergence of the divide between these positions within the Christian tradition. Nature and Command

He also has held a courtesy appointment at Vanderbilt as adjoint professor of engineering management, where he has regularly given lectures related to ethics over years.

With all these career accolades under his belt, when you get down to the basics, Clanton says he just wants his work to “have a lasting impact on knowledge. I want to know more than a fleeting truth. I want a truth that has lasting power.”

See more of Lipscomb’s faculty authors in the digital Faculty Reading Room at lipscomb.edu/FacRead

Lipscomb Faculty Reading Room

Lipscomb University faculty were busy putting pen to paper leading up to the 2022-23 school year, exploring topics such as the faith of historic leaders, biblical theology, practical tips for parents of teens, the philosophy of morality and best practices for teaching gifted students.

David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction

The late Dr. Jerry Gaw (Lipscomb Retired Professor of History) University of Tennessee Press, 2023

David Lloyd George is perhaps best known for his service as prime minister of the United Kingdom during the second half of World War I. While many biographies have chronicled his life and political endeavors, few, if any, have explored how his devotion to democratic doctrines in the Church of Christ shaped his political perspectives and choices both before and during the First World War. In David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction, Gaw bridges this gap in scholarship, showcasing George’s religious roots and their impact on his politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

With a comprehensive narrative that spans more than a century, Gaw’s book ranges beyond typical biography and examines how the work and theology of Alexander Campbell, a founder of the StoneCampbell Movement in America, influenced a prominent world leader.

George’s 12 diaries and the more than 3,000 letters he wrote to his brother between 1886 and 1943 provide the foundation for Gaw’s thorough analysis of George’s beliefs and politics. Taken together, these texts illuminate his lifelong adherence to the Church of Christ in Britain and how his faith, in turn, contributed to his proclivity for championing humanitarian, egalitarian and popular political policies beginning with the first of his 55 years in the British Parliament.

Other available books by Gaw include A Time to Heal: The Diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society).

God and Morality in Christian Traditions: New Essays on Christian Moral Philosophy

Dr. J. Caleb Clanton (Distinguished University Chair in Philosophy and Humanities) and Dr. Kraig Martin, co-editors

Abilene Christian University Press, 2022

Christianity presumes morality is connected in important ways to God. God and Morality in Christian Traditions explores a wide range of philosophical issues related to that connection, including the metaphysical foundations of morality, the Fall and its implications, and how faith can affect one’s ability to discern obligations.

Also included is a robust treatment of how vice and virtue shape one’s ethical life, as well as a timely discussion of how people— both Christians and non-Christians—can address deep moral disagreement in a pluralistic society.

Drawing on Catholic, Protestant and free church traditions, this volume highlights perspectives drawn from the natural law tradition, divine command theory and virtue ethics, among other theoretical frameworks. Along the way, the authors provide salient insights on metaethics, moral epistemology, character development and applied ethics.

Scholars and students in Christian ethics, philosophy and theology will benefit from this carefully edited and rigorously argued collection of essays.

Clanton is one of Lipscomb’s most prolific writers, having authored or edited several books, including: Restoration and Philosophy; Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition; The Philosophy of Religion of Alexander Campbell.

Practical Wisdom for Youth Group Parents

Dr. Walter Surdacki (Lipscomb Professor of Bible) and Dr. David Fraze Leafwood Publishers, 2022

A youth group is not only about your teenager. Youth ministry, done well, includes and impacts the entire family. Practical Wisdom for Parents is not a book about how to make your teens sit down and have a family devotional. Instead, this book will help you and your teen thrive and flourish during these important years.

The authors give numerous practical suggestions on how you can work alongside and support those leading your youth ministry, including a variety of ways you can support and be involved in your teen’s youth ministry experience. Many of their ideas are “behind the scenes” that don’t require you to teach a class or lead a devotional. However, your partnership role with your youth ministry leadership will be clearly articulated throughout.

Surdacki teaches various youth ministry and practical ministry courses at Lipscomb. He has served in full-time ministry for more than 16 years.

Flesh Made Word: The Protestant Interpretation Problem and an Embodied Hermeneutic

Dr. Lauren Smelser White (Lipscomb Assistant Professor of Theology)

Fortress Academic, 2022

This book delineates the individualist “interpretation problem” that has long beset Protestant biblical interpretation and engages theological resources that could serve to move beyond it.

White argues that readers of Scripture— specifically those who long to submit their lives to God’s transforming Word, which they believe the Bible discloses—ought to reckon with the participatory role that human bodies (corporeal and corporate) play in producing revelation’s norms. Such a reckoning need not entail giving up on Scripture delivering the life-changing address of a divine Other.

In support of that claim, White distills a picture of revelation as a divine-human discursive encounter: a process wherein our hermeneutic constructions are incorporated into the Word’s self-disclosure, and whereby interpreters who embrace this venture in vulnerability may experience graced transformation.

She concludes by proposing that this “Christomorphic” interpretation process is analogous to a mother’s embodied responsiveness in caring for her child. Such a hermeneutic paradigm suggests distinctive commitments from communities who desire to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in interpretive acts.

Coaching in Gifted Education: Tools for Building Capacity and Catalyzing Change

Dr. Emily Mofield (Lipscomb Assistant Professor of Education) and Dr. Vicki Phelps Routledge, 2023

Gifted students spend most of their time in the regular classroom, yet few general education teachers have the specialized training to address their unique needs. This book provides the structures, processes and resources needed to facilitate GT (Gifted/Talented) coaching as a means of building capacity among classroom teachers to identify, serve and teach gifted and high-potential learners.

Guided by best practices and research in professional learning, this resource provides the steps, strategies and tools needed to create and sustain effective coaching practices. Bolstered by downloadable resources, chapters address how to support, stretch and sustain teachers’ instructional practices through a sequence of co-thinking, co-planning and reflection.

Outlining a step-by-step guide for the coaching process, this valuable resource equips gifted and talented coaches with tools to support teachers to meet the needs and reveal talent among gifted and high-potential students.

Mofield’s 12 other books include Collaboration, Coteaching, and Coaching in Gifted Education: Sharing Strategies to Support Gifted Learners, a 2021 NAGC Book of the Year award winner.

2022 MLPS capstone projects

VALERIE LISA BOOKER

Senior Mortgage Loan Officer, Mortgage Solutions Financials

RENA PURDY, AYERS SCHOLAR

Executive Director, Wayne County Joint Economic and Development Board

The Rural Hospital Crisis: A Community Approach

Especially post-pandemic, hundreds of rural hospitals in Tennessee are at eventual or immediate risk of closure.

TAYLOR DILL, AYERS SCHOLAR

Data Manager, Ayers Foundation

Creating Resiliency and Opportunity in Rural Tennessee Through Broadband

A growing digital divide exists between rural/urban population centers and between the wealthy and the poor due to uneven broadband distribution.

WILLIAM RAWLS, AYERS SCHOLAR

Mayor, Brownsville

Reducing Recidivism Through Education and Workforce Development

Lack of education and lack of a trade or skill greatly increase recidivism among released inmates.

KEELI ALLEN, AYERS SCHOLAR

VP of Community Development, Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce

The Effects of Childcare on Women in the Workforce

Examining the effect that childcare availability, affordability and quality have on women in the workforce.

Brownsville

Homebuyer Education Should Be Required for FirstTime Homebuyers

To improve consumer financial decisions when purchasing a home, it would be instrumental to take a homebuyer education workshop.

SYDNEY Y.K. BROWN

Executive Director, Roberta Baines-Wheeler Pulmonary

Hypertension Awareness Group

Utilizing Community-Based Rehabilitation and Regression Therapy for Resiliency and Recovery in Schizophrenia

Evaluating the influence of adverse childhood experiences on the development of schizophrenia and psychosis in youth and adolescents and community-based rehabilitation interventions which provide significant change.

JOSHUA BELL

History Teacher and Coach, Brentwood Academy

Nuclear Power’s Future in Tennessee

Assessing nuclear power as a sustainable energy source and whether or not nuclear power should be used by Tennessee as a primary source of energy.

Parsons

Out of State

VAN SUI

Government Affairs Liaison, Indiana Housing and Community Development

Quality of Life Review: Young Refugees and Immigrants

Understanding the quality of life of vulnerable immigrant populations through reviews of their identity formation processes, educational access and professional development participation.

LOCATION: INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

JOHN MCKINNEY

Waterfowl Program Manager, Nebraska Game & Parks Commission

Is “America’s Best Idea” in Jeopardy?

Possible solutions for managing increasing visitation rate and their associated negative effects in national parks.

LOCATION: LINCOLN, NEBRASKA

Waynesboro

Lawrenceburg

MACKENZIE CHARPENTIER

Director of Volunteer Services, Nashville Rescue Mission

A Starting Point for Resolving Homelessness in Nashville

The public’s lack of understanding of homelessness is one of the biggest barriers to solving homelessness.

BRENT EASLEY

Legislative Director for Tennessee’s Governor

Avoiding a Fiscal Cliff: Carroll County 1,000 Acre

Recreational Lake

Case study of a lake project carrying massive debt and headed toward imminent default and the challenges to stabilizing the situation.

KEVIN LAUER

Technology and Mission Support Branch Administrator, Tennessee Emergency Management Agency

Geospatial Intelligence Strategy for Emergency Management

TEMA’s struggles with gaps in situational awareness, disaster response and day-to-day awareness due to nonstandardized response strategies.

Nashville

Turning local leadership into statewide impact

When Lipscomb’s Master of Arts in Leadership and Public Service (MLPS) was first established in 2019, the underlying purpose was to bring local leaders from Tennessee’s three Grand Divisions together to share ideas and collaborate to advance the state as a whole.

The effort is already paying off as the capstone projects of two 2022 program graduates are already influencing public policy proposals.

Rep. Mark White, director of community and government outreach at the College of Leadership & Public Service, has already drawn from the projects of two alumnae to inform a bill he has proposed in the Tennessee legislature.

The Promising Futures bill would combine agencies that provide early literacy instruction with child care agencies to create childhood literacy centers across Tennessee using

state money from the sports betting lottery. White got the idea from two of the LPS students, Allison Woodward (MLPS ’22) and Keeli Allen (MLPS ’22), whose capstone research projects both explored the obstacles to women entering the workforce.

Research is an important part of a skill set that allows local leaders to have a positive impact on the whole state, said Laura Encalade, executive director of Lipscomb’s School of Public Policy.

“With the goal to better understand and solve pressing community issues, we provide the skills to engage in qualitative and quantitative research and use that research to serve future constituents,” said Encalade. “When our students face leadership challenges in the future, we want data and research to be at the forefront of their solutions.”

KIMBERLY HENRY Director of the Tennessee Governor’s Office of Diversity Business Enterprise

Knoxville

Johnson City on GRADUATE 43 lipscomb.edu/research

focus

Young Scholars Make the Grade: From Studying to Published

Eight students in biomolecular science expected to gain published citations in the next year

Lipscomb’s Master of Science in biomolecular science (BMS) is closing out its first decade of existence, having already achieved strong outcomes with an excellent acceptance rate to doctorate and medical programs and more than 20 students published in academic journals, with eight more to be named as authors of paper submissions within a year’s time.

“Conducting research independently is becoming more and more important to our students as professional school admission requires more than a competitive grade point average and exam score,” said Dr. Bonny Millimaki, director of the BMS program and associate professor of biology.

Given that trend, Lipscomb’s master’s program is designed to involve students in much more than a supportive or housekeeping role.

“When we say they get research experience, we mean they are the ones in the lab running the experiments,” said Dr. Amanda Williams (bs ’03), assistant professor. “Most of our graduates are likely at the level of an end-of-the-first-year-Ph.D. student in other graduate programs.”

Five of Williams’ BMS students and two of her biology undergraduate students have earned authorship on a paper she expects to submit for publication by this summer: Erin Lisk (bs/bms ’22), Liz Fisher (bs ’21), Erick Gonzalez (bs ’17, bms ’18), Nicholas Ryan (bs/bms ’22), MiKayla Scillion (bs/bms ’20,

mpas ’22), Reagan Bain (bs/bms ’21) and Gina Gad (bs’21).

Each of these students independently and substantially contributed to the paper by either developing the study design, running the experiments, completing the data analysis or writing part of the manuscript. Two of these students previously presented findings at the Keystone Symposia in Utah in 2022.

“It says a lot about the level of student that we have at Lipscomb,” said Williams, “the fact that they can gain authorship on a paper, when most students do not have the foundational skills to earn first authorship until the second or third year of a Ph.D. program.”

Williams’ research looks at the role of the innate immune peptide called HD5 and

its presence in the colon in Crohn’s colitis patients. Their work could someday lead to improved diagnosis of Crohn’s vs. ulcerative colitis patients and a better understanding of whether HD5 in the colon is helping or harming the patient.

Williams currently has six papers in the works, with 13 undergraduate and graduate BMS students working on them.

Likewise, Mirna Mina Abouda (bs ’19, bms ’22) earned first authorship status for a paper that former Lipscomb Associate Professor Dr. Beth Conway plans to submit for publication within a year.

Conway has spent 20 years researching proteins that encourage blood vessel growth to tumors, a topic particularly relevant to triple negative breast cancer. She has had 20 BMS students published in journals such as Oncogenesis, Angiogenesis and Journal of Cancer

Mina Abouda spent more than two years working with Conway for her thesis project on how neprilysin, a cell-surface enzyme, regulates the signaling pathway in triple negative breast cancer. Mina Abouda presented her findings at the St. Jude National Symposium on Undergraduate Research and her abstract was published in Genetics in Medicine, both in 2022.

“Mirna’s work on this project not only significantly clarified the contribution of neprilysin to activation of an important signaling pathway in the most aggressive form of breast cancer, but she also learned to design, perform, analyze and communicate her scientific findings,” said Conway.

Others would agree. Mina Abouda plans to continue studying cancer biology as she has been accepted to the Ph.D. program at the Medical University of South Carolina.

“We didn’t just gain the ability to work hands-on, we gained the ability to work brains-on,” she said. “I had the opportunity to move the project forward. She let me bring my own ideas to the table. She would say, ‘Let’s think together about how to get this from point A to point B.’ I don’t think I would have had that opportunity elsewhere.”

Since its launch in fall 2022, 77% of the BMS program’s pre-med graduates have been accepted to medical school and 90% of those applying to Ph.D. programs have been accepted. Ninety-eight percent of graduates are working in science in fields such as medicine, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, clinical research, primary research, clinical management, biotechnology and nursing, among others.

Learn more about the biomolecular sciences program at lipscomb.edu/BMS.

“WE DIDN’T JUST GAIN THE ABILITY TO WORK HANDS-ON; WE GAINED THE ABILITY TO WORK BRAINS-ON. SHE LET ME BRING MY OWN IDEAS TO THE TABLE”

—MIRNA MINA ABOUDA

MiKayla Scillion (above) running her own experiment in the biomolecular science lab.

Mirna Mina Abouda’s (right) work regarding angiogenesis earned her first authorship status on an academic paper to be submitted within a year.

Faculty and students develop new resources for annual sustainability travel studies

For 15 years the Institute for Sustainable Practice has been taking students to see firsthand the practice of sustainable communities on its summer study trips to New England and Texas.

Over the past two years, Dodd Galbreath, professor and founding director of the institute, along with students Sam Kuhn (’22), and Abigail Miller, then-junior, have been working to make the trip an even better learning opportunity by developing a case study handbook for students.

As the practice of sustainability has grown over the years, “the complexity of the trip has grown exponentially,” said Galbreath. “Students were telling me that they were struggling to take it all in.”

Galbreath and the students mapped all the sustainable organizations in the target regions and then collected various

relevant metrics on each, such as kilowatts used, certifications earned or LEED scores. They developed a site analysis workbook with a summary, learning objective and a unique checklist for each site visited.

The intent is for students to have a visual cue to assess the big picture. The case study handbook sparks conversation about why one organization has many or few metrics checked off or what does the number of items checked say about the organization’s priorities or its timeline for development.

Appendices also include a guide to Vermont sustainability laws, a list of all the biofuel-based electricity plants in New England and maps of all the towns visited with sustainable aspects of those towns highlighted.

“It’s like a textbook for a living case study,” said Galbreath.

(Above and Below) Lipscomb graduate students analyzed the regional commercial composting and recycling centers for the Chittenden County Solid Waste District in Vermont. The centers divert up to 57% of construction, demolition, business, and household wastes from landfills.

Students can now draw from excavation sites in Sudan and Jordan for Ph.D. work

The Lanier Center for Archaeology took on two new excavation sites this school year: the Nuri Archaeological Expedition in Sudan and the Abila Archaeological Project in Jordan.

Perfusion students and faculty test optimal transit time for cardiac drugs

When one student asked Christopher Yann, then on faculty at Vanderbilt University, a question he couldn’t answer about drug transit times from the extracorporeal circuit to the patient during cardiac surgery, he said, “Well, let’s just go down to the lab and try it out.”

They did, and it turned out that the answer wasn’t simple to determine and there isn’t much current data available. After coming to Lipscomb in January 2022 as the simulation coordinator for the School of Cardiovascular Perfusion, he decided to carry out experiments using dye and its perfusion simulation equipment to better determine how quickly drugs take effect in a patient during cardiac surgery, depending on the injection point.

As the experiments progressed, Lipscomb’s College of Pharmacy came on board as a partner with Yann and his students, McKenzie Bangasser (ms ’23) and Josie Anderson (ms ’23), providing the use of a photo spectrometer so they could use the real drugs in the cardiopulmonary bypass circuit and measure the transit time from different

injection points more accurately.

“Through these experiments, we can get a feel for what a perfusionist should do during a surgery if he or she wants a drug to reach a patient at a specific time to counteract potential damage to the heart,” said Yann.

The interdisciplinary nature of the research project brings home to students how important it is to be familiar with the role every person in the operating room is playing, said Yann. “Communication is our lifeblood in the operating room. If we are not on the same team, we are in trouble.”

Perfusion students Daniel Nicks and Samantha Mullvain are expected to continue the study over the course of the next school year.

“This study looks like it has a very good possibility of impacting the profession, so I jumped at the opportunity to research it with Professor Yann and my fellow students,” said Nicks, of Northridge, California. “I believe this research will result in the best patient care possible by ensuring rapid administration of the drugs to the patient.”

The center sent its first team to the Nuri site, a royal cemetery and acropolis with several pyramids, in January. Three Lipscomb Ph.D. students joined Dr. Tom Davis, professor and associate director, to clear a sufficient amount of the temple to determine if any ancient reliefs/or inscriptions were intact, and, if so, to record them.

The Nuri site has been featured in documentaries and while working at the site, Dr. James K. Hoffmeier, a famed Egyptologist, interacted with the Lanier team.

“Nuri provides our students a very rare experience of excavating a very significant site including pyramids, temples and churches. This site provides students’ access to unpublished archaeological material to use in their dissertation studies,” said Davis.

Abila is known as one of the cities of the Decapolis, 10 Roman cities east of the Jordan River. It was home to five prominent churches during the Byzantine period.

“Abila straddles the Christian/Islamic interface in Jordan and will provide new insight into how Christians responded on a local level to the Islamic conquest of Jordan in the 7th century AD,” said Davis. “We are winding down our excavation at Kourion, a 4th century AD site on Cyprus, so this project will allow the Lanier Center to remain active in the archaeology of Late Antiquity and Early Christianity.”

Work on the Nuri Archaeological Expedition site in Sudan.

New Master of Science in Dietetics and Internship launched

In August, the Lipscomb University Health Sciences Center enrolled the first 12 students in its new Master of Science in Nutrition and Dietetic Internship (MS DI), a program that combined Lipscomb’s existing master’s and internship to meet new accreditation standards for the industry.

Currently, students with an Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics (ACEND)-accredited bachelor’s degree in dietetics can complete a dietetic internship to sit for the registration examination for Registered Dietitians (RD), but starting in 2024, the RD title will become a master’s level credential, said Dr. Autumn Marshall (’92), chair of the nutrition department. Lipscomb responded to this industry change by developing its own graduate program to allow students and interns to fulfill all their licensure requirements at Lipscomb.

Becoming ACEND accredited in 2002 had already fueled increases in faculty hires and research, said Marshall. Becoming its own stand-alone department also fueled the addition of a sixth full-time faculty member and even more research as the department develops new specialized tracks, she said.

Dr. Tracy Noerper, director of the Masters in Nutrition program, alongside Anne Lowery, internship director, said the master’s program provides students with the ability to choose concentration areas of interest.

“It is valuable that students can tailor their experiences to something they are interested in because we have concentrations in health promotion and wellness, medical nutrition therapy and sports nutrition,” said Noerper.

This means interns can have more experiential time in areas of interest and can tailor their dietetics research interests.

We take joy in celebrating who we are as discoverers

Excellence in research leads to excellence in teaching and learning.

We have come to a truly exciting time in Lipscomb’s history. As outlined in the Lipscomb Impact 360 Strategic Plan initiated in August 2022, we are prioritizing an increase in research activity and productivity at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels.

Through a sustained commitment to building and elevating our research environment, we are striving toward the long-term goal of achieving R2 status (doctoral universities with high research activity), as defined by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. This ambitious goal signifies a substantial movement in the identity of the university, so I do not take on this challenge lightly.

From its founding as a Bible college in 1891, Lipscomb has been resolute in its mission to prepare learners for purposeful lives through rigorous academics and transformative experiences. It grew into a liberal arts college in 1918 and into a university in 1989 when it awarded accredited master’s degrees for the first time. Today, Lipscomb University is classified by the Carnegie Foundation in its R3 category (doctoral/professional universities with moderate research activity), which acknowledges the number of doctoral degrees awarded annually and its current research efforts.

Among our first priorities is to study our existing investment into research and development, so we can fully understand how influential factors such as faculty teaching loads, sabbatical policies, faculty development, incentives, budgets and facilities have been impacting our ability to carry out research. Such an understanding will allow us to develop a more sophisticated approach to identifying and applying for appropriate research grant opportunities based on our own strengths and priorities.

In the coming years, we have to work hard to let people know, both on campus and off-campus, about all the good work going on in research and scholarship at Lipscomb. Improvements, such as the newly formed University Research Council, are vehicles we can use to tap the strengths of every sector of the university in regards to research. The launch of centers of excellence such as the Lipscomb University Health Science Center will fuel additional collaborative, discipline-specific research communities, interconnecting knowledge creators and the resources they need to create.

We have a lot of strengths to build on. We should take joy in celebrating who we are as discoverers, especially as excellence in research leads to excellence in teaching and learning, which have long been intricate pillars of our identity and vision for the future.

The Carnegie R2 criteria has no requirements for lower teaching loads. So, while achieving the next level of research status will expand access to research funding, increase opportunities for collaborations with other top research universities and help to attract and retain top faculty and students, it will not mean less focus on teaching and personal interaction with students.

It will require significant steps to develop a stronger research culture throughout the university but it will not change who we are as a Christ-centered community, dedicated to equipping students to succeed in their vocations. Substantial growth in research will only further our legacy as a community with ambitious service to others and a drive for continuous improvement.

Best,

Dr. Candice McQueen President, Lipscomb University

Nashville, TN 37204-3951

Address Service Requested

empowering scholarsTHE NEXT GENERATION OF

UNLEASHING THE POWER OF CURIOSITY

Discover how Lipscomb University empowers its students to become scholars through the annual Student Scholars Symposium. Featuring keynote speaker Lipscomb Provost Dr. Jennifer Shewmaker in 2023, the event celebrates undergraduate and graduate students’ research and fosters their passion for academic inquiry.

This year’s symposium also showcased the collaborative art and poetry exhibition that highlights the creativity and interdisciplinary collaboration between students and faculty Learn how Lipscomb University creates a supportive and engaging learning environment that brings out the best in its students.

Read more about our STUDENT RESEARCH on PAGE 10