Lyceum Volume III Fall 2019

Lyceum

A literary science journal Celebrating 50 years of women at Kenyon President

Miriam Hyman

Treasurer

Sumaya Ahmed

Event Coordinator Katherine Crawford

Contributing Leads Rand Burnette India Kotis

Editing Team Leads Graham Ball Miriam Hyman

Editing Team Sumaya Ahmed Chris Bechtol Rand Burnette Nathan Chu Cassandra Lis India Kotis Meheret Ourgessa Sheetal Tallada

Design Team Grant Holt Sierra Smith Frances Wiggins Katya Naphtali

Front Cover Yiyi Ma

Back Cover Rand Burnette

Fall 2019 Volume III

Editor’s Note A year ago during the activities fair, I sat down with Anu Muppirala ‘19 and Sarah McPeek ‘19 to discuss an idea I’d had over the summer for a science-art magazine. I learned that Sarah had tried to start a science magazine the year prior - the publication hadn’t been realized, but she still had the website, and the name: Lyceum.

Together, we reimagined a magazine that could express our love for science and for art, breaking boundaries between disciplines and making science accessible and engaging for a public audience. This year, Lyceum had its own table at the activities fair. The Lyceum team was reinvigorated with students who helped to organize campus events, write, edit and design our Fall 2019 issue.

This year is the 50th anniversary of women at Kenyon. In this issue, we celebrate the ingenuity and achievements of women in science, and recognize how a diversity of voices and perspectives strengthen community.

We examine the contributions of conservative playwright and philanthropist Clare Boothe Luce, share the radioactive legacy of Marie Curie, and enter Kenyon’s science quad to hear from our own women in STEM, both students and faculty.

Though art, photography, poetry and prose written by students of every year, and majors from every department, we hope that this issue of Lyceum is emblematic of why diversity and inclusion are vital within a community. I am extremely thankful for the support that Lyceum has received thus far from students and faculty, and am especially grateful to the team of students who worked together to make this issue possible. As I prepare to go abroad this upcoming semester, I have faith that this incredible team will continue Lyceum into the Spring of 2020 and beyond.

Best, Miriam Hyman ‘21 Co-founder and President of Lyceum

David Han

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Table of Contents Editor’s Note by Miriam Hyman...............................................................................................................................4 Owl by David Han.....................................................................................................................................................4 The Women by India Kotis........................................................................................................................................6 Clare Boothe Luce at Kenyon by Yiyi Ma..................................................................................................................8 Ibex Nebula by Kylie Writer....................................................................................................................................11 Connect the Dots by Sierra Smith............................................................................................................................12 Cosmic Microwave Background by Nathan Chu....................................................................................................13 Aurora by Kylie Writer............................................................................................................................................13 Medicine by Sheetal Tallada...................................................................................................................................14 Rings by Elena Ruiz.................................................................................................................................................14 The Half-Life of Marie Curie by Grant Holt...........................................................................................................15 Chornobyl by Chris Bechtol.....................................................................................................................................18 Nuke by Griffin........................................................................................................................................................18 Gopher Tortoise, 50 Years Old by Miriam Hyman................................................................................................21 Oh, Beautiful by Miriam Hyman............................................................................................................................21 Bird Catcher by Miriam Hyman.............................................................................................................................21 Snowdays by Rand Burnette...................................................................................................................................21 Spore by Nathan Chu..............................................................................................................................................22 Moss by Frances Wiggins.......................................................................................................................................23 Rose Quartz by Rose Paulson..................................................................................................................................24 Eclipse by Griffin.....................................................................................................................................................26 Rocks by Elena Ruiz................................................................................................................................................29 Scale Paintings by Rand Burnette...........................................................................................................................31 Thoughts on Jesus’s Microbiome by Sutton Amthor..............................................................................................34 Fragrant Love by Beimnet Kassaye.........................................................................................................................34 The Secrets of Earthworms: A Comic by Katya Naphtali......................................................................................35 Mauck In, Mauck Out by Miriam Hyman..............................................................................................................36 Petrels by Katie Mauck...........................................................................................................................................39

The Women

How a Socially Conservative American Ambassador, Congresswoman and Feminist Playwright Funded Generations of Female Physical Scientists

by India Kotis

In 1936, The Women, a satirical social commentary and comedy of errors, opened for the first time on Broadway. Penned by Clare Boothe Luce and featuring an all-female cast of forty-two, The Women shed light on a world rarely seen on stage in 1936: The menless, empty days of aristocratic Upper West Side women; their petty gossip, at times their woeful cluelessness, their lively comedy and their and messy, groping humanity--what Luce herself referred to as a “bedraggled bit of Park Avenue plumage.” Enjoying Broadway revivals in 1973 and in 2001, as well as a blockbuster cinema adaptation in 1938, the play was remarkable in and of itself for Luce’s quick wit and masterful manipulation of language. What made the show truly unique, however, was Luce’s voluminous, unilateral cast list.

The Women’s female-only casting translated to starring roles, and therefore reliable work, for scores of actresses. This was no small feat in Depression-era Broadway, where female roles were often relegated to the background or stripped of much dramatic substance, and whose accompanying salaries were often similarly deflated. Though Luce mocked the characters she had drawn in The Women, she always bore in mind the real-world consequences for what she put down on paper. Her choice to build a show which would employ no less than forty actresses was tantamount to a bid at structural cultural change.

Eighty three years later, Luce’s influence and capital continue to posthumously guide the present and future of American women, albeit in quite a different arena: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

We know Luce from the flyers that pepper the science quad’s bulletin boards. Now in its thirtieth year, the Clare Boothe Luce Program has to date funded the research of 2,600 women, in fields ranging from chemistry to astrophysics to statistics. Many Kenyon students have been awarded the prestigious scholarship throughout the years, including Rachel Nguyen (‘19) whose research regarding the universal reheating which precipitated the Big Bang is proudly trumpeted both on Kenyon’s website and the CBL homepage. Luce’s choice of scholarship is something of a curiosity, because although Luce did enjoy a multifaceted career as actress, playwright, journalist, politician, and ambassador to Italy and Brazil, a STEM researcher she was not.

Born Anne Clare Boothe in 1903 as the sec-

ond illegitimate child to traveling salesman William Franklin Boothe and aspiring actress Ann Snyder Murphy, Luce grew up in Tennessee, Chicago, Garden City and New York. She sometimes worked as a child actress, understudying on Broadway at ten years old for the renowned femme fatale, Mary Pickford. That same year, her parents split up and her mother soon married Albert E. Austin, a medical doctor who would go on to serve as a Republican U.S. representative of Connecticut, a harbinger of things to come for Clare herself. By 1942, Clare Boothe Luce had followed in her stepfather’s footsteps and was an elected Republican congressperson for the state of Connecticut. It was an impressive feat for a woman in a man’s game, and a Republican in a Democrat’s state. It was also a curious twist in the life of Luce, since she had begun her political career as a dyed-in-the-wool progressive radical.

Before she was elected to congress, before she was a Broadway playwright or ambassador or mother, Luce was a door-to-door campaigner for the National Woman’s Party. At the age of eighteen, with only four years of formal education under her belt, she went to work for the original author of the Equal Rights Amendment, Alice Paul. Soon thereafter, the teenaged Luce caught the eye of the famed New York heiress and suffragist, Ava Belmont Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt offered Luce a job, and Luce was soon traversing Washington, and the homeplace of the first national congress for female suffrage, Seneca Falls, advocating for equal rights for women. The Woman’s Party had recently turned from a placid, equivocating interest group to a radical advocacy organization. It was the first party to picket the White House, and regularly engaged in civil disobedience before dissolving into a cesspool of puritanism and in-fighting.

Luce’s youthful zest for left-wing activism soon waned, however, and was replaced with a lasting, if paradoxical conservatism. Luce was first elected to congress in 1942, seven years after The Women premiered. In the intervening years, Luce served as a war correspondent in Europe, toured Japan, and profiled General Douglas Macarthur. These experiences no doubt impacted her worldview, and her politics. By the time Clare became “Representative Luce,” she was an avowed and enthusiastic conservative. In one particularly infamous conference talk, she so bitterly eviscerated Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom she’d once been allied, that her fellow conservative states-

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men gave her a gentle, professional slap on the wrist.

Not only did she disparage President Roosevelt, but she also referred to the liberal hero Eleanor Roosevelt as “that disgusting Eleanor.” Luce was a staunch American interventionist, writing about America’s urgent need to arbitrate Europe’s growing Nazi party as early as the 1930s, yet was opposed to women’s rights back home. In spite of her history with Alice Paul, when Luce was invited to co-sponsor the Equal Rights Amendment in 1943, she claimed that her invitation had gotten “lost in the mail.”

All the stranger, then, that Luce decided on the support of women--and science--as her dying legacy.

How did someone who began her political career as a Women’s Party volunteer at Seneca Falls come to end her life as a Reagan Republican? Why did a woman who was devoted to the fallible, humanistic disciplines of theatre and politics endow her considerable posthumous fortune to research in the physical sciences?

There is a fairly straightforward answer to the latter question: Luce was a founding member of the Atomic Energy Commision, a postwar initiative that worked to find positive ways of furthering atomic research in the wake of Hiroshima. The experience surely endowed Luce with an appreciation for the gravity and the responsibility that came with research in the physical sciences. The question of how Luce moved from liberalism to conservatism, however, is a little harder to untangle. Like most people’s political ideologies, Luce’s was probably a befuddled mix of life experience, historical context, and personality. Luce was a

complicated figure, who embarked on a life more storied and far-flung than most people could account for in an entire genealogy. Some of her achievements, like her 1939 book Europe in Spring, which issued a grave warning about the oncoming threat of the Nazis, have bore out as the sage voice of a canary in a coal mine.

Others (that Eleanor Roosevelt comment, yikes) come off as boorish, unnecessary, and wrong-headed. Does Clare Boothe Luce’s footprint hover over the research she funds from the grave? If so, how? And if not, why did she make the scholarship at all?

Modern feminists have adopted Luce as a cause célѐbre. She was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2017, and is regularly the subject of moony-eyed articles in publications like Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

While she did enjoy the trappings of fame, it’s not at all clear that Luce would have appreciated being held up as an emblem of contemporary feminism, or even the feminism of her own period. There exists a tension between who Clare Boothe Luce was, and how we imagine her to be today. Luce embodied a sharply female, and therefore paradoxical, form of misogyny. She did not really stand for “women” as a class, so much as for one woman--that woman being Clare Boothe Luce. Luce’s biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris, remembered that when she first met Luce, at a mutual friend’s party in 1994, Luce wouldn’t so much as say hello. Rather, “she only [wanted] to talk to the men.” Throughout her political career, Luce encouraged women to marry and settle down. Given her wide-ranging professional life, and the generous scholarship fund that she set up in her will, her conservative ideology around gender relations seems surprising. Perhaps this is because she deemed women’s unmarried involvement in public life unseemly.

Perhaps it was because she no longer saw the point of a gender rights’ movement--she’d made it this far, hadn’t she? Perhaps, and this is the version I find most probable, Luce thought that by advocating for the gendered role that many of her male colleagues preferred, she could maintain her individualized and revered status as the rare woman who’d “made it.”

The stratigraphy of Clare Boothe Luce’s life, which turned from arts, to politics, to the fiscal fulcrum of science, initially took me by surprise. Like all of us, Clare Boothe Luce was a cacophony of contradiction. It would be unfair, not to mention reductive, to shrink her down to a stereotype. Despite inhabiting the classically feminine profile of so many women of her day--she was by all accounts liquefyingly charming, seducing the likes of Joseph P. Kennedy, Randolph Churchill and Lucian K. Truscott, Jr. over the course of her thirty-year open marriage--Luce was a studied agent of boy’s-club peacocking. At the same

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time, Luce had a keen awareness of sexism. For example, she once wrote that “Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes.’ They will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes.’”

In 1883, the abolitionist and suffragist Matilda Gage, for whom “The Matilda Effect,” was named, published “Woman as Inventor” in the North American Review. The Matilda Effect, a psychological phenomena whereby studies by female scientists are often considered less credible than studies conducted by male scientists, was already in full swing in the U.S. Gage’s piece described the mechanical genius of women, as evidenced by millenia of homespun inventions. In defense of her thesis, Gage outlined various women-made technologies spanning thousands of years, and the impact that these inventions had on society, summarizing that “the inventions of a nation are closely connected with the freedom of its people.”

In other words, female inclusion in science would be a collective boon to the nation. It was not just a matter of personal integrity, although that was to be a nice side-effect. For Gage, supporting women scientists was critical to the political success of America.

Perhaps Luce saw things similarly. Although she was never a scientific researcher, she had broken into the boy’s clubs of twentieth century playwriting, and the even boys-ier club of twentieth century government. She may have correctly assessed the fields of physical sciences as just another boy’s club, which female scientists were eager to infiltrate. Perhaps to Luce, science and equality were two sides of the same democratic coin. The scholarship declares that the scientific community owes it to itself to embrace its female practitioners. Female chemists, physicists, mathematicians and engineers have valuable points to contribute to our fabric of scientific understanding, just as female playwrights and politicians contribute to present and future society. A generation of female scientists, or two, or twenty, would both further American democracy and be born a product of it.

On the other hand, Occam’s Razor may cut the closest when it comes to Clare Boothe Luce. One of Luce’s more oft-quoted sayings is, “I refuse the compliment that I think like a man. Thought has no sex, one either thinks or one does not.” This scholarship is Luce’s invitation for young women to think, and think hard, about topics that will inform our society and the world. Luce may have invented her sex-segregated scholarship with the hope that someday it wouldn’t be needed. In the meantime, however, the Clare Boothe Luce Program provides promising young women who dream of careers in the physical sciences unbridled opportunity and an undeniable edge. One hopes that Luce would be proud.

Clare Boothe Luce at Kenyon

by Yiyi Ma

There is a historic disparity between men and women PhD scientists in math, statistics, physics and chemistry—also known as the “physical sciences”.

In a 2017 report released by Elsevier, of all of the US physicists and astronomers who published articles, reviews or conference proceedings, only 21% of these scientists were women. Despite the small number of women scientists, their publications tended to be cited and downloaded just as much as their male colleagues. For many disciplines in the physical sciences, the drop-off in women is most stark between undergraduate and PhD tracks. For some disciplines such as physics, the pipeline starts leaking even earlier.

Although the problem is evident, the solution we are searching for is unfortunately complex. Questions we must consider include how the lack of women in academic administration influences the prospects of younger women interested in science, as well as the effect of deeply ingrained, gendered stereotypes of whether women belong in STEM or not. Oftentimes, the answer is not as clear-cut and quantitative as we would prefer to see. However, the most important truth is obvious: we must support our fellow women scientists as they pursue their paths—especially those who are interested in math, statistics, physics and chemistry.

The Clare Boothe Luce (CBL) Scholarship is a program funded by the Henry Luce Foundation that supports women interested in majoring and pursuing a career in the physical sciences by facilitating a closely mentored research experience over the course of nine months. During these nine months, students develop a close bond with their mentors and regularly update other scholars and mentors with the progress of their own research. Important topics in science are discussed, such as the nature of academia, networking, and the philosophy of science and research.

Scholars are well supported with a $7000 stipend and an additional $1000 for research and traveling.

This year, Kenyon will host their last set of CBL mentor-mentee pairs. In celebration of Kenyon’s 50 years of women, we are featuring 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 CBL scholars and how their relationship with science has grown.

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Maddie Stover ’20 is from Michigan and does gravi-

tational wave science at Kenyon. She feels at home in the Kenyon physics department because of supportive friends and faculty. During the Clare Boothe Luce program, she found a small but diverse community of women outside of her discipline in physics. Maddie encourages other women interested in physical sciences to not be deterred by the fact that women are a minority. The support among women is positive and tight-knit. She is currently applying for PhD programs in astrophysics. Outside of science, she enjoys singing with the Stairwells, spending time in the BFEC, hanging with friends, reading, traveling, exploring art museums and baking bread!

Allegra Fass ’21 is a physics major and philosophy

minor with a hopeful scientific computing concentration. She loves her cat, Mila, who has an Instagram account. Alegra is a tour guide and works in admissions. Since high school, she’s gone from doing lots of musical theater to working in Tom Giblin’s computational cosmology lab. She loves outer space—her current research involving programming a code that evolves scalar fields in spherical conditions which can help us understand the Big Bang, dark matter, and dark energy. Her time with Clare Boothe Luce helped her realize the importance of a supportive team and built her confidence as a physicist, not just as a physics major. She encourages other women in science to not be afraid to ask “stupid” questions and reach out to possible connections. She hopes to continue CBL for another year and eventually become a physics professor at a small, liberal arts college.

Elise Hokanson ’21 is an enthusiastic vegan who

loves science. She’s been vegan for four years, and has been on the cross country/track team for about a year. Elise is a chemistry major, math and bio minor and aspires to be a physician one day. Her experience at CBL has helped her discover her love for math and biology and find chemistry outside of synthesis. She also appreciates CBL for helping her connect to other folks who have similar interests, regardless of their gender. In the future, she wants to continue computational chemistry research and is currently applying for other internships. Elise hopes to try out living in a new city.

Kathryn Grutkoski ‘21 is a physics major and math

minor from Minnesota. She loves physics and the outdoors!

Minnesota has provided lots of snowy winters for skiing and ice-skating. She also loves hiking and camping during any season. When not exploring the rugged outdoors, she loves playing French Horn in organized ensembles and reading. Her experience in CBL has given her the opportunity to learn and participate in discussions concerning science as a discipline, such as the ethics and current hot topics. CBL helped her realize the importance of community within the sciences. She urges other women in the physical sciences to develop close relationships with eachother. Kathryn has reapplied for CBL for the next year and will be continuing with her research.

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The Clare Boothe Luce scholarship aims to help women in the physical sciences achieve their next steps. These past CBL scholars share how their experience in science has changed after the program.

Margo Goldfarb ’20 is a senior chemistry major, biology minor,

with interests in philosophy of science and scientific computing. Before coming to Kenyon, she played soccer and rode her horse, Twobits. She loves her cat Josefina (la loca) and playing frisbee. Margo is currently a captain of the womxn’s ultimate Frisbee team at Kenyon. Her research in CBL involved understanding the metabolic pathway of beta-alanine in plants. Through CBL, Margo gained the skills and confidence from the intense research experience to further pursue her interests in science. She attended the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology conference and presented her research, then researched in chemical biology at Vanderbilt’s REU. She is currently working on her senior honors thesis with her PI, Dr. Kerry Rouhier.

Margo urges her faculty and peers in traditionally masculine fields to to support one another and hopes to guide future scientists in the same way.

Emily Rachfal ’20 loves math and plays the harp. She researches

number theory with Dr. Judy Holdener and loves volunteering with children in her free time. She also loves knitting and board games. She believes that mathematics can be beautiful and researched perfect numbers while in CBL. Despite CBL being Emily’s first real research experience, her work was published in the Mathematical Monthly. Her research experienced proved to be an exciting, fascinating, and successful endeavor that she plans to continue in graduate school and beyond. Emily encourages inclusivity in the physical sciences by providing safe communities for women to feel welcome and pursue their passions. She wants all people to know that they belong.

Georgia Stolle-McAllister ’20 is from Baltimore, Maryland

and loves physics, learning languages, hiking and reading. While in CBL, she researched with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) to look for signals from intermediate-mass black holes. Georgia’s CBL experience made her realize that research is not about knowing the solutions—but rather, asking the questions and trying different possibilities to solve these questions. She no longer works with LIGO anymore but loves astrophysics the same. She is currently working on an observational astronomy project concerning how sunspots work on other stars. She encourages faculty and mentors to recognize contributions of female scientists and mathematicians to make more visible role models for younger women scientists.

Yiyi Ma ’20 loves chemistry, specifically nuclear magnetic resonance

(NMR), weightlifting, running and relaxing. Prior to Kenyon, she wanted to be a concept artist for the gaming industry but her interests have shifted to chemistry, medicine, and ethical science. During CBL, she researched the synthesis of all-carbon quaternary stereocenters, a structural unit found in many naturally occurring biologically active compounds. She learned that the nature of science rapidly changing and the focus of innovation is on the unknown. Her experience at CBL has given her a greater appreciation for the chemistry that has been done, is currently being developed, and future chemistry. She urges fellow scientists to introduce math, physics and chemistry to girls as young as possible, and to support women in their science journey at an early age.

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Kylie Writer

Connect the Dots

by Sierra Smith

Science is often thought of as empirical;

requiring logic and rationality, with research as the mechanism by which we rationalize the word around us. Research is meant to make the world feel smaller, less complicated even. However, when humans are brought into the equation, it becomes more challenging to deal with numbers and equations. No matter how we measure and quantify people, it becomes apparent that a person is not the sum of their parts. This is where clinical research faces a dilemma: how can a person retain their identity as a data point?

Medical charts have discovered a plethora of ways to quantify a person. Age, height, weight, date of diagnosis, length of survival, white blood cell count, number of relapses; I grew very familiar with these quantified versions of patients when I conducted clinical research, but lacked this familiarity with patients themselves. I began clinical research at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a senior in high school excited to exercise both a desire to help others and a love for science. I was ecstatic to analyze the survival rates of pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients with different genetic mutations. I scanned through the medical charts of patients ranging from two days to two decades old, recording all factors that could be useful in determining the outcome of their condition.

I expected it to take around 10 minutes to acquire all of the important information. Each person fit neatly into a row of a spreadsheet. One spreadsheet quantified 300 people whose faces I could not picture.

The charts that interfered with my efficiency had more than numbers. They had conversations and stories that could not be quantified. When care providers for the patients left detailed notes on the medical charts about the patient’s personality, their family support, and their questions about their condition, it felt horribly impersonal to skim these stories for the numbers I was tasked to find. Medical charts with anecdotes assembled the numbers into living beings, and scoffed at science’s attempt to inventory them. The detailed charts oozed compassion and

purpose that my sterile white spreadsheet of patient data lacked. They helped remind me why we conduct clinical research, and who is impacted. While scientific data makes diseases easier to rationalize, it’s much harder to understand how a case of mono can later lead to a lymphoma diagnosis, or how a doctor can explain to a young athlete’s family the baseball-sized tumor masking their son’s heart. It’s difficult to understand why a person your age with a very treatable form of leukemia chooses to discontinue treatment.

Science could not answer these questions for me, so I probed the doctor who treated these patients with inquiries, but even he did not always have the answers.

The patient whose chart simply remarked “discontinued treatment” despite a lack of treatment complications haunted me. I had to delete her data from the spreadsheet since I couldn’t know how long she would survive after diagnosis. Her row disappeared from my spreadsheet because her life could not be quantified.

She was alive but at the same time she was not.

The distance between the patients and I grew smaller when I transitioned from data analysis to wet lab work. Handling still-warm patient blood samples in a lab, I was still only examining a piece of them.

Though working with blood and bone marrow is slightly more personal than numbers, the gap between the patients and I persisted. We spun the blood samples in a centrifuge to separate it into layers of plasma, white blood cells and platelets, and red blood cells, subsequently breaking the patients into even smaller components. We extracted the white blood cells for counting, and for patients on immunotherapy, measured how much of the drug was in their blood at different time points. We recorded how effective the new drugs were in fighting a patient’s leukemia, learning about their health hours before they would.

From names on page, to blood in vials, and finally, to patients in beds before me, I took a final step closer to the patients. I watched names materialize into children as I followed a doctor during rounds in the hospital. Walking by the side of the doctor I was shadowing, we approached the bed of a teenager whose name I recognized from my spreadsheet.

He had been diagnosed almost a year ago, and was one of the randomly selected patients enrolled in the

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study of trial medication to actually receive the new drug. I knew he was responding well to the treatment, and was likely to go into full remission. Reading his medical chart and analyzing his blood had made me hopeful. Seeing the tired, underweight boy before me made me nervous. It made me understand that treatment is not as simple as having a positive or negative outcome. The lived daily experience of a patient cannot generalized in such a dichotomic way. I left the patient’s room having only exchanged introductions, but frequently reopened his chart later on to check on the status of his treatment.

Data becomes more complicated when it has a face, but it’s important to remember that it always had a face. A patient may not be defined by their data, but it still belongs to them. In clinical research, it is important to distinguish between the data collected about ailments and ailments themselves. This research can help us understand the components of the human experience, but the human experience cannot be found in the numbers on a spreadsheet. Reopening my spreadsheet of patient data, I began to match patient names to patient faces, and felt a deeper connection to my work. I tried to use my research as a way to better understand the identity of patients rather than to erase it. I learned to not only connect the dots on a graph, but to also connect the data points to their creators. I believe if we allow science to be more human, we can use it to care for more humans.

Cosmic Microwave Background A slow solid drop of water rolls off the edge

slides into the Pool A small silent ripple breaths

sighs into the waiting world

free at last to sing its song That ripple will cross the entire Lake

casting its echo far and wide tasting the vastness

teaching its small song

an ode to its beginnings In time, the Ocean will hum to the tune, somehow

invested in the smallest part of itself that’s intertwined so deeply

it is impossible to forget

that single drop

by Nathan Chu

Kylie Writer

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Medicine

by Sheetal Tallada

My mother was terrible at playing sick. A full six years old, I brandished my plastic, kid-sized stethoscope and faux-prescription pad, searching for the perfect diagnosis. Unfortunately, the perfect diagnosis was impossible because, well, my mother was perfectly healthy. Also, I had never been to medical school.

My passion for medicine spawned from wearing my career-day costume as a doctor in elementary school. I remember going to Costco. I was trying to decide between a hairdresser and doctor costume for my elementary school’s career day. A smile radiated from my face with my plastic stethoscope around my neck and my plastic auriscope in my hand. Since that day, I’ve tried to implement medicine in everything.

My mother tells me that your education is the only thing that cannot be taken away from you. As her daughter, it was a blessing to know that my desired career path was something that my family would accept and value. But a few questions still lingered in my head. “Am I just good at science, or do I l​ove​science?

Is there more to medicine than just being capable of doing it? Will practicing medicine fulfill me?” I realized that the answers to these questions were not going to be found within myself. I would have to look at my surroundings, especially medicine’s impact on other people.

Being an avid traveler (along with having many relatives in India), I have visited my parents’ hometowns multiple times. Culturally driven and exotic, these places satisfied me. However, they also had many poverty stricken areas, and it was evident that healthcare there was not well-regulated.

My grandfather suffers from multiple medical problems, including Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s causes a drastic reduction in dopamine levels in the brain and can emerge because of genetics, age, sex, enviroment, or a combination of these factors. If my grandfather lived in the United States, he would have access to medication, physical therapy, or even surgery. However, the only treatment option he has in India is medication, and the medication that he uses has many side effects, such as indigestion, tremors, and nausea. I have seen him before and after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I know how debilitating a neurological disease can be.

My grandfather isn’t the only one who emotionally affects me. When I travel, I always see someone suffering from a physical, medical problem. In the first-world, we recognize that many people suffer from

medical issues, but we rarely internalize the severity of the disease or disorder and how it impacts their life.

By the time I was in high school, I realized that I wasn’t just ‘good’ at science, but I could also directly help people like my grandfather by practicing medicine. I started to do research on a specific type of protein (​alpha-synuclein)​that causes Parkinson’s when misfolded. I spent two years on this research, testing various natural medications that would reduce the amount of alpha-synuclein.​I ended up presenting my findings at the Ohio State Science Fair both years.

I also researched alternative treatment options for Parkinson’s. I volunteered at the InMotion Parkinson’s Awareness Center in Warrensville Heights, Ohio, which is a non-profit that focuses on using exercise to slow the progression of Parkinson’s. Volunteering there inspired me to modify current treatments for disorders and to make treatments more accessible

At this point, I realized that medicine requires more than just competence and an extensive education; it requires compassion. In this path of self discovery, I was able to find my interests in my surroundings. My pathway towards finding my passion made me realize that even without the best resources, one is able to find a way to implicate their interests. From my grandfather to my project, I realized that I do have dedication and passion for medicine. I plan to take this same passion and implement it into my education in order to enhance my future career in medicine.

Yes, I am too old to play doctor with my mom now, and I cannot force my mom to play sick anymore, but I still would love to have a stethoscope around my neck—a real one. I want to have that same smile radiating from my face, but this time, I want it to stem from the satisfaction of helping others in need.

Elena Ruiz

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The Half-Life of Marie Curie

In 1920, Marie Curie developed cata-

racts. The first female professor hired at Paris’ elite Sorbonne had to write her lecture notes in huge letters and rely on her daughters to guide her around campus. We understand today that exposure to radiation can be harmful to the lens of the eyes. Marie, unfortunately, lived in a time where the hazards of radiation were not taken seriously.

But Marie was not ignorant to radiation’s dangers. She advocated lead screens and blood tests for those working with radioactive materials. In her laboratory, Marie tested her researchers’ blood counts.

She firmly believed that only trained personnel should handle radioactive materials. At the expense of her own health, Marie’s efforts protected others from dangerous exposure to radiation.

In 1934, she developed aplastic anemia, and her body stopped producing new blood cells. Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, at the age of sixty six.

France interred her twice. The first time was in the same cemetary where her husband Pierre and in-laws laid to rest.

by GRANT HOLT

Then, in 1995, France reinterred Marie and Pierre in their national mausoleum: the Panthéon.

The Curies joined some of France’s most distinguished men—Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, and Hugo.

Marie was the first woman to join them.

But before visitors could pay their respects, she needed a lead-lined coffin.

Now, more than 100 years since her death, the body of Marie Curie is still radioactive. The Panthéon took precautions when interring the woman who coined radioactivity, discovered two radioactive elements, and brought X-rays to the frontlines of World War I.

Even Marie’s belongings—papers, furniture, cookbooks—are still radioactive. Her original notebooks, for example, are in France’s National Library, in Paris. Like their author, these manuscripts are in lead-lined boxes. If you want to hold her notebooks, you will need to sign a waiver and wear protective clothing.

If you want to see Radioactive—the upcoming Marie Curie biopic—you only need to buy a ticket.

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Radioactive stars Rosamund Pike and Sam Riley as Marie and Pierre Curie, respectively. The movie chronicles the radioactive discoveries of the Curies, and their passionate romance. Set to be released

by Amazon Studios in 2020, the movie begins at the end of Curie’s life. Her story is told as a flashback. It begins on November 7, 1867, when Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born in modern day-Poland.

Her father was a mathematics and physics teacher. Her mother operated a boarding schools for girls, but died from tubuerculosis in 1878. Marie was ten years old.

Barred from attending the University of Warsaw, Marie instead attended the Flying University.

This was a series of informal classes held in secrecy that admitted female students. In 1891, Marie enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. She had very little money, and survived on buttered bread and tea. Marie earned her master’s degree in physics in 1893, and a mathematics degree the following year.

She met Pierre Curie in 1894. After graduating from the Sorbonne, Marie was looking for a large laboratory space. A mutual colleague believed Pierre had access to such a space. He didn’t, but they married a year later. At first, Marie and Pierre worked alone, focusing on their own projects. This changed when Marie developed a theory about uranium rays.

Marie furthered the research of French Physicist Henri Becquerel. Becquerel discovered that uranium emitted rays. Marie discovered that these rays remained constant despite the uranium’s condition.

Marie theorized that these rays originated from the atomic structure of the uranium. Her theory created the field of atomic physics. To describe this new kind of energy, Marie coined a new term: Radioactivity.

The general attitude towards this new energy was that it had to be good for your health. Makers of everything—from cigarettes to makeup—added radioactive materials to their products. Burk & Braun, for instance, was a German candy company that produced the Radium Schokolade chocolate bar. It was marketed as chocolate that would make you look younger.

Water crocks that stored drinking water were radium-lined. Manufacturers promoted them as a cure for

Marie ca. 1920s

arthritis and wrinkles. Golf balls had small amounts of radioactive materials embeddd in them. This let Golfers find missing balls with a portable Geiger counter.

Pierre and Marie would later discover two elements. They used pitchblende, a radioactive mineral rich in uranium. Pitchblende’s radioactivity was high—too high for it to only contain uranium. Marie believed that there were other unknown radioactive elements within it.

They separated pitchblende into separate components. Using an electrometer, the Curies measured the radioactivity of each section. The bismuth section acted chemically like bismuth. But, since it was radioactive, this meant it was something new. In 1898, the Curies published their discovery of a new element: Polonium, in honor of Poland.

The barium section also contained something new. Five months later, the Curies published their discovery of another element: Radium. They named it after the latin word for “ray.”

At first, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Marie was not nominated. A member of the nomination committee had to intervene. Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler wrote Pierre, informing him of the situation. Pierre’s response asserted that a Nobel Prize for radioactivity demanded recognition for Marie. The committee then validated her nomination. In 1903, Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Notably, this 1903 Nobel Prize did not mention their discovery of two new elements. The nomination committee believed that both Curies could win

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the prize again, and chose to omit it. Tragically, the committee was wrong.

In 1906, three years later, Pierre lost his life.

He was in Paris. It was a Thursday. It was raining.

Pierre was on his way to a meeting to review proofs with his publisher. While crossing the street, a horsedrawn wagon carrying six tons of military uniforms ran him over. In an instant, Pierre was dead.

Less than a month later, Marie received a job offer from the Sorbonne. She would take over her late husband’s professorship. Marie accepted the position, and became the Sorbonne’s first female professor.

In 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium, and for the isolation of a gram of radium. Marie alone received the prize. In her acceptance lecture, she shared the honor with Pierre. Upon her acceptance, Marie became the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice. She remains to this day the only person to have won in two separate sciences.

The death of Pierre spurred Marie to create a state of the art laboratory. A grant from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie allowed Marie to assemble a research staff. The Sorbonne joined with the Pasteur Foundation—a non-profit organization—to fund the Radium Institute. Marie built the institute a few streets away from the lab where she and Pierre had worked.

There were two divisions. Marie directed The Curie Laboratory. Here, researchers would study radioactivity. Here, researchers would study the biological effects and medical applications of radioactivity.

Construction of the Radium Institute completed in 1914. Around the same time, World War I began, and Germany declared war on France.

The French military drafted Marie’s research staff into service. As the German army advanced, the French government relocated to Bordeaux, a port on the southwestern coast of France. The French government brought with them the nation’s entire supply of radium: one gram.

This was the gram that Marie and her late husband extracted after refining tons of mineral ore.

This was the gram that won Marie the 1911 Nobel Prize. She held it in her lab. Marie placed the radium

in a lead-lined box, and traveled with it to Bordeaux.

After leaving the radium in a safe-deposit box, Marie returned to Paris. Before she could reclaim her radium, France would need to win the war.

Marie devoted herself to the cause. When the war effort called for gold and silver, she offered to melt down her Nobel Prize medals. When they turned her down, Marie used her prize money to buy war bonds. Marie was a devoted French citizen, but also a scientist. She would save French lives through a type of electromagnetic radiation: X-rays.

Since X-rays were in hospitals—far from the battlefield—Marie would bring X-rays to the frontlines.

She transformed cars into mobile X-rays units.

Each vehicle contained an X-ray machine and photgraphic darkroom equipment. By October 1914, Marie had a fleet of twenty cars outfitted with X-ray equipment. Each vehicle required someone to operate the X-ray apparatus. For this task, Marie initially trained twenty women volunteers. She would train many more. Marie instructed volunteers in the physics of electricity, X-radiation, anatomy, and photographic processing.

French soldiers would dub these mobile radiology units as Petites curies—Little Curies. Marie even had a personal Petite Curie. She had given lectures on X-rays at the Sorbonne, but she had no personal experience with them. Marie intended to drive a Petite Curie herself to the frontlines. She learned how to drive a car and did crash courses in anatomy and X-ray technology. She even learned rudimentary auto mechanics. She had to learn how to clean a carburetor. To assist her, Marie chose her seventeen old daughter, Irene. She became Marie’s first radiological assistant. In the autumn of 1914, Marie and Irene, along with a military doctor, took a Petite Curie to the battlefield.

Estimates say that over one million soldiers had X-rays examine them by the war’s end. Marie was in her lab when Germany signed an armistice. She hung her French flags in her windows, and drove her Petite Curie out into the streets in celebration.

Celebrate the life of Marie Curie by going to see Radioactive, set to be released in 2020.

17

Chornobyl

by Chris Bechtol

Griffin

Four days before May Day celebrations were to take place in the Soviet Ukrainian city of Pripyat’, the nearby Chornobyl (Russian: Chernobyl) nuclear power plant’s Reactor 4 melted down. As a result, extremely high levels of radiation were released into the air and into the Chornobyl reservoir, which was an offshoot of the Dnipro (Dnieper) River, which ultimately feeds into the Black Sea. The Soviet authorities initially tried to cover up the meltdown, and until Swedish weather personnel discovered the huge cloud of radiation migrating over towards Norway coming from close to the Ukranian-Belarusian border, the coverup worked. As 2019 marks the 33rd year since the meltdown, the remains of the towns within the Exclusion Zone offer a unique insight into how the environment reclaims lands taken by humans.

All of the accessible buildings have been “cleaned” during the cleanup of the meltdown: everywhere the

public can access on the tour has about the same level of radiation as downtown Kyiv, the capital two hours south (the radiation plumes went northwest, so Kyiv barely got irradiated).

Thirty-three years of abandonment have left a mark on this Zone. Pripyat’ is much greener than it ever was due to the abundance of trees in the city, the roads are cracked and sometimes overgrown, and some buildings are on the verge of collapse. Some places, like the Red Forest, were so radioactive (and still are) that they had to be destroyed during the liquidation. Other parts are so overgrown that one cannot move through them without feeling like they are on a hike in the Appalachians. As terrible a disaster as the Chornobyl Meltdown was, it’s provided humans a unique opportunity to see how life recovers after human abandonment.

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The power plant from the road parallel to the waterway. This water was used for cooling the reactors, and is so radioactive that visitors can’t leave the road.

When reactor 4 and part of Reactor 3 melted down (now contained under the New Safe Confinement, left), it caused a massive dispersal of radioactive particles into the air, which caught in the wind and spread around Northern Ukraine, Belarus, and eventually made it to Sweden, where scientists first noticed the heightened levels and alerted the world (below).

The majority of the town of Pripyat’ and the power plant in the distance looking south, as viewed from the top of a 16-storey apartment building. Pripyat’ mainly had 5-, 9-, or 16-storey buildings, and now the trees are so overgrown that you can no longer see any 5-storey buildings from the higher buildings. Even some 9-storey buildings are starting to become hidden by the trees, as can be seen in the center-left of the picture. Looking north, one sees Belarus, as Chornobyl is closer to Belarus than to Kyiv (above).

This statue of Vladimir Lenin has only survived the effects of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution solely because it is in the Exclusion Zone, yet there even Lenin hasn’t survived the march of time (below).

This is the closest a visitor can get to Reactor 4, as radiation is too high for normal exposure without protective gear. Even here one has to wear long sleeves, pants, and closed-toed shoes, and show as little skin as possible. The monument in the foreground is one of many dedicated to the liquidators of the plant (above).

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In the center of Pripyat’, remnants of a fair remain.

Reactor 4 melted down on April 26, five days before May Day celebrations were to take place across the Soviet Union. The fair was brought in for the celebrations, and was just about to open when the disaster occurred. Now, the grounds are almost overgrown, the Ferris wheel and bumper cars are rusted out (you can see the central circle of the wheel is broken), and the Swing Boat ride has a tree in the middle of it (below).

The basketball court in the athletic center after 33 years of decay. When Pripyat’ was still inhabited, this was where people went to relax. Even abandoned, you still get a sense of how life functioned: it’s very easy to picture what this place looked like with people in it, with glass in the windows, and people sitting up in the spectator area on the second floor (above).

Perhaps the most striking image, the bank in a small town within the Exclusion Zone has been completely overgrown, even more so than the town of Pripyat’.

Looters have been responsible for the majority of the physical damage to the building (as well as on other buildings), smashing windows and stealing the letters on the sign, but the abundance of trees gives the visitor the feeling that they’re not in a town but rather on a hike in the woods (below).

The swimming pool across the hall from the basketball courts. The glass in the windows is gone because looters took the aluminum siding of the windows and left the glass to break. A swim clock hangs by the windows, while the empty pool is slowly filling with debris and insulation that falls from the ceiling. Old diving blocks line one side, and a large double-decker diving board joins them. Opposite the windows, a catwalk goes across the one full wall on the second floor, giving spectators the opportunity to watch the swimmers. Stairs in the corners lead down to the locker rooms (above).

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Gopher Tortoise, 50 Years Old We saw the tortoise through The rear-view mirror.

“Stop!” Jorge yelled.

We clambered out of the van.

Ran along the side of the Highway. It was still trying to cross Front legs dragging

Rand Burnette

Vibrant innards Across the blacktop.

Jorge crouched to slide his hands Under each half.

Held it together as he Hurried the tortoise to the grass, Phoned wildlife services. Asked “Can somebody look up local vets?”

And then “Does anybody have a knife?”

I heard the flies congregating around our ankles As he killed it. Heard the cars Rushing, rushing, rushing by.

Oh, Beautiful This grass beneath my feet is a homogeny of sin Their blades cut monosyllables Their roots still let light in.

They are our modern prairie fields That fed the buffalo Now they feed scraps and bottle caps and Pop cans crushed below.

How beautiful this prairie green These emerald waves of turf.

Bird Catcher The sky a snowy tundra We set mist nets in the air And wait for winged and flying fish To tangle in our snare.

Like spiders we will stick them In our webs of nylon string Like spiders we will draw their blood From underneath a wing.

But does the spider marvel At the heartbeat of a fly Does it caress, enraptured By two bright and livid eyes?

And what of spiders sentiment To fly or winged fish Which claws and pecks and defecates Despite benevolence?

We sure know how to landscape Our warm and dying earth.

Poems by Miriam Hyman

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Spore

by N at han C hu

On my way back from the dining hall, I crossed a tree growing fungus. Completely different from

a flower, an obscene bloom, like a tumor, bulged out from the base. I had failed my midterm earlier that day.

I paused for a moment, considering if I should take a picture. Some spore had hiked across the

world to land in this poor tree. Was that worth it? I imagined tendrils slipping through the core, devouring, sucking the life out of this maple. The insides rotting away, leaving a spongey web of pulp and mycelium. A decomposer turned parasite.

It probably bloomed every year. Even if I broke it off, it would return next fall. Would it fall on a

dorm then, this tree? In winter, when its branches froze and cracked, would this old maple come crashing down on the freshmen?

Shadows lengthened, and a pair of girls walked past me on their way towards greater things. I root-

ed around for my phone and snapped a picture, wondering if I felt kinship with this aberrant. Quietly idling away, content to live off others’ successes.

Surrounded by so many driven and talented people, was it natural to feel left in the dust? Like a

spore in the wind, tumbling away. ***

I passed by that tree two weeks later, flowerless. My bloom had been ripped off.

Fragments of the fungus still clung to the tree. Fleshy tufts of life that had survived to spite the hu-

mans who had ripped away all hope of beauty and success. Who was the parasite?

A few of us are born into happiness, a few claw their way up to it. I remembered my friends the day

I found my flower. Seated around a long table, each chattering away about their research and internships, their summer jobs and scholarships. I sat silently. They’ll reach the summit where the wind blows freely and carries you off towards your dreams.

I think we like to think of ourselves as seeds. We just need the right environment to grow and bloom

into something brilliant. Sometimes, it’s just bad luck that you land in a patch of weeds, but if you have friends to uproot and transplant you, or else rip out those bad influences, you can always succeed. I think people like to think like that. I see those people every day, focused on their goals, creating art, bridging gaps, doing research.

But I’m a spore, no good without the rest. Always searching, needing more to succeed, stealing ideas

and hope. While the others around me grow beautiful, I’ll burrow deeper. And when they bloom, people will stop and smell them, then cut them and take them home to brighten their lives. On the way to their house, perhaps they’ll spot me and pause to wonder if they should save the tree I’ve attached myself to.

And even then, I’ll want to live.

22

Franny Wiggins

Rose Quartz

by Rose Paulson

In the Walmart parking lot, Anna arranged

the crystals in a circle and sat inside it. The crystals filtered the afternoon sun and projected dots of color on the asphalt—crimson, emerald, cerulean blue. This is how Your Crystals and You recommended she spend the total solar eclipse if she wanted to align her heart with the healing power of the moon.

The eclipse tourists began to fill the parking lot. They set up their lawn chairs, tried on their NASA-approved sunglasses, unloaded their coolers of beer and juice boxes. A taco truck arrived and a line started forming.

Anna and Dennis had driven a half hour northeast of Cleveland to the lot because it was just inside the path of totality. In forty-five minutes, the moon would pass in front of the sun, and the sky would go completely dark.

“Hey Anna, what’re you doing?” Dennis sat down next to the circle. He squinted through his thick glasses in the bright sun.

“I’m charging my crystals,” Anna said.

“Are you joking?” Dennis laughed. “Are you actually serious?”

“Fuck off, Dennis,” she said, sitting up straight, eyes closed.

He had been her ride to the parking lot, a last minute decision when her mom had picked up a double shift at the hospital and needed the car. They were cashiers at Kroger, and they’d gotten off work at the same time, just soon enough to drive here before the eclipse began. Dennis had pretended he didn’t want to go, had made Anna beg him to drive her, but she sensed his nonchalance was an act. They’d worked together for the past three summers, since Anna had graduated from high school and Dennis had begun his PhD, and he’d asked her to dinner before.

Each time she’d declined, but he still offered her half his chicken sandwich every day in the breakroom, and she always took it, even when she had her own lunch.

“But like, you don’t really believe in that stuff, do you?” Dennis asked.

“Of course I believe in it,” said Anna. “I’m an Aries.” Her mouth spread into a smile.

“Oh, wow.” Dennis said. He ran his fingers through his dyed green hair, exposing blond roots

growing in underneath. “I didn’t know you were one of those people.”

Eleanor, the only person Anna had ever truly loved, believed in crystals. They would stay up late in the chemistry building finishing their respective labs— Anna’s for Chem 230, Eleanor’s for her senior seminar—and then go back to Eleanor’s apartment, where Anna would watch her collect the crystals from her windowsill and arrange them in a muffin tin to charge under the moon.

“What’s the science behind those, anyway?”

Anna whispered one night as they lay side by side in Eleanor’s twin bed. She watched Eleanor run her fingers over a small orange crystal cube on her nightstand.

“What do you mean, science?” Eleanor picked up the stone and held it above them in a sliver of porch light coming in through the blinds. She placed it in Anna’s hand. “Don’t you sort of feel the vibrations?”

Anna turned the crystal in her fingers, feeling nothing, and wondered if Eleanor was joking. Eleanor took Anna’s hand in hers, the cube pressed in between their palms. They stayed like that for a while.

“Yeah,” Anna finally said. “I guess I feel it.”

Eleanor’s hand recoiled and the cube dropped to the space where their shoulders pressed together. “Some people just can’t feel them, Anna. It’s okay.”

Anna picked up the crystal and held it between both her hands. There was still no vibration.

Eleanor lifted her head and pulled her hair out from underneath her shoulders and over to one side. For a moment her forehead dipped forward and Anna could smell her sweet, always-clean, Eleanor-scented hair.

“It’s faint, but I really do feel it,” Anna said, turning the crystal over in her hand.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Eleanor kissed Anna on the neck, which made her feel fully awake. She held her mouth closed to keep her teeth from chattering. Sleeping over at Eleanor’s apartment was never a good idea, because Anna got too excited to get very much sleep, but she kept doing it. They had only really started hanging out right before winter break, which meant they had just over a semester before Eleanor graduated and left Anna alone for two more years. How unfair it had

24

felt, that their time together in college was so limited.

Every night they shared counted.

In May, when Eleanor had said she had done long distance before and just wasn’t cut out for it, she gave Anna a tiny turquoise stone. “It promotes healing,” she said. “It got me through my last break up.”

As she left, Anna felt like throwing the stone at Eleanor’s apartment window but instead kept it in her clenched fist until she returned back to her dorm room and deposited it in a small dish where she kept the other crystals Eleanor had given her—amethyst, when her grandmother was sick; black obsidian, when she finally declared her chemistry major; rose quartz, which Eleanor had given her without telling her what it was used for. Anna thought it meant Eleanor was falling in love with her.

Anna opened her eyes. “Hey, can you hand me my phone?” She pointed outside the circle and Dennis retrieved it for her. “Thanks.”

She opened her Find My Friends app and adjusted the screen until she recognized her own glowing blue dot next to the highway. The initial “M” for “Mom” rested over the city, but she zoomed the screen outward until it encompassed not just the suburbs of Cleveland but all of Ohio and Pennsylvania and into New England, and finally, the orange circle with a single capital E hovering over Boston.

She zoomed back in again until she located Eleanor’s dot on Solar Heights Drive, at her parents’ house. Ever since the summer began, the dot was always there when Anna checked it. They had shared their locations in the spring, when it seemed important to know where each other was at any given moment.

Find My Friends brought Anna a sharp pang of jealousy for Eleanor’s family, her mother and father and younger sister who got to spend the entire summer with her and who Eleanor could never push away.

Anna imagined them sitting in their front yard in lawn chairs, already wearing their eclipse glasses, hamburgers cooking on the grill. Maybe Eleanor would be bent over her own crystal circle, pink lips parted in concentration, her spine protruding between her shoulder blades like raindrops on a spider web. No one would criticize or question her because her parents were kind-hearted and gentle, and because she had graduated with honors and was going straight to grad school in the fall.

When Anna had said she was probably just going to work at Kroger again that summer, Eleanor was genuinely confused. “I know you’re not sure what

you want to do after graduation, but Martha says that grad schools care as much about your involvement in research as your grades.”

Martha was Prof. Bennington, Eleanor’s faculty advisor. Eleanor had gotten published with her last summer and was occasionally invited over to their house for dinner with her and her husband.

Anna had passed by Prof. Bennington’s office hours once and caught a glimpse of them showing each other pictures from their phones.

Everything was easy for Eleanor. She never doubted herself or wavered in her decisions, never rehearsed phone calls before she made them. Her mom and dad were university professors of math and anthropology, respectively, which, to Anna, felt an unfair advantage. In Eleanor’s childhood they had sent her to Quaker school and ballet lessons and whenever they came to visit campus they always wanted to see the latest exhibit at the art museum.

All of this made Anna want to both slip inside Eleanor’s skin and sit beside her, holding her hand, so she could both be and be with Eleanor.

Anna closed the app and stared at Dennis, who tapped furiously at his phone, then frowned, looked up, and met her eyes.

“I lost,” he said. “How much longer?”

“It starts in four minutes.” Anna bit her nail.

“But it won’t get dark for another half hour.”

Dennis returned to his game. When she started working at Kroger, all her friends’ moms had wanted to know if she knew the guy with the green hair. He charmed them by saying the names of their fruits and vegetables in German. For the past three summers, Anna listened to him do this for entire eight-hour shifts.

He looked up from his phone again, seeming to finally notice the crowd that was forming in the center of the parking lot. “Why is everyone wearing 3-D glasses?” The eclipse had been all over the news, but when Anna had asked him to drive her, she had to explain to him what a total solar eclipse was.

“They’re safety glasses. So you can look at the sun without burning your eyes out. I have some for us in my purse.”

He glanced in the direction of the sun.

“Dennis! Don’t look. I’m serious.” She began rummaging through her bag. “You’ll actually go blind.”

Dennis rose from the ground. “I’m gonna buy some snacks. You want anything?”

Anna shook her head and watched his figure shrink as he crossed the parking lot into the Walmart.

25

Griffin

His khaki pants were baggy on his slender frame and flapped against each other between his legs.

The glasses made the sky completely black until Anna craned her neck and found the sun: a glowing orange circle, exactly how a child might depict it in the corner of a crayon drawing, except for a concave sliver beginning to cover one side. She had never seen the sun like that. The tourists pointed at it with mouths agape, then looked at each other, grins wide across their faces, passing their glasses back and forth. A woman on a picnic blanket held a kid-sized pair on the face of a small boy and whispered into his ear.

Two older women in lawn chairs cracked open cans of beer and clinked them together. The man handing out samples at the taco truck put down his tray momentarily to gaze at the sky.

Anna willed herself not to track Eleanor’s location again and looked around for Dennis. He walked toward her, plastic bag in hand, and when he sat down next to her produced two bottles of Dr. Pepper. “Got this for you.”

On the car ride over, Dennis had kept glancing at Anna in the passenger seat. She tried not to notice, instead affixed her gaze on the road ahead.

With one hand on the steering wheel, Dennis maneuvered his right hand around the central console and found the long black aux cord. “You wanna DJ?”

Anna shrugged. “You’re the driver.”

“You wouldn’t like my music,” he said. “It’s, like, a lot of death metal.”

Anna took the aux cord. She should have known Dennis would be into something like death metal.

“I’ll try to find some eclipse-themed songs.”

The highway became busier as they got closer to the line of totality. They sat in silence as Anna’s music played soft, gentle melodies sung over acoustic guitar.

Dennis picked up Anna’s phone and read the artist’s name aloud. “I don’t think I’ve heard her before.”

“Do you like this song?”

“Yeah. It’s good.”

“We can change it, if you want.”

“No, really,” he said. “I like listening to your music. I want to like the type of music you like.”

It was funny to think that awkward, greenhaired Dennis would like the same type of music.

Most of Anna’s favorite artists were women who had long flowing hair and wore floral shawls draped

around their shoulders. They sang about love and heartbreak and their grandmothers. Anna looked over at him for the first time since they got in the car. He bobbed his head silently ahead of the beat, tried to mouth the words of the song.

Now, as she eyed his offering of soda, she wished she had just insisted that he pick the music.

“It’s starting.” Anna handed him a pair of glasses. “Check it out.”

Dennis struggled to position them over his own glasses.

“Be careful,” Anna said. “You can’t use them if they’re even a little bit damaged.”

“I’m being careful.” Dennis finally slid them between his eyes and his real glasses. Holding them in position, he looked around aimlessly, like a blind rodent emerging from the ground.

“What am I supposed to be looking for? I can’t see anything.”

“Turn to the left a bit,” Anna said.

Dennis turned. “Oh, I see it.”

He was silent, then removed the glasses, handing them back to her. “That’s actually pretty cool.”

“I know, right? And it’s just going to get even cooler.” Anna waved the glasses away. “I have my own.”

“So how much longer?”

“Like twenty minutes until totality.”

Dennis uncapped his Dr. Pepper and gestured toward the crystal circle. “So what exactly are you trying to do here?”

Anna flipped Your Crystals and You open to the page she had been reading. “It says that the eclipse is the best time to charge your heart chakra crystals.”

“What’s a chakra?” Dennis pushed his glasses further up his nose and squinted over the book.

“It’s like, I don’t know how to explain it exactly—I think it’s like a part of your body that corresponds to a part of your life. Like, your throat chakra has to do with communication.”

Dennis took the book from her and began to read. The spine was still stiff and he had to press his hand over the glossy white pages to keep it open.

Anna had bought it a week ago, in what had felt like the first real step in feeling better after the breakup.

She had hardly eaten anything for the first two days, then became ravenous, eating entire packages of frozen tortellini and banana peppers straight from the jar. Her parents took her and her younger brother out for pizza to celebrate her return, and briefly she wished she could tell them about Eleanor, but it would

27

have required context she had never given anyone back home.

They would have been fine with her dating a girl, would have said they loved her no matter what, but it was too much to explain, too many feelings and not enough words. They were too simple and pragmatic to understand.

Her mom was a nurse and her dad a middle school math teacher, and on the weekends they drove her brother to soccer games and caught up on the TV dramas they had missed during the week.

It was hard to imagine they had fallen in love, with each other or anyone. Anna kept her sadness to herself.

This had continued until finally, after clicking all the way through a Facebook album of Eleanor’s graduation pictures, she drove across town to a strip mall with a store called Pearls of Wisdom. She wandered aimlessly around the store until a woman in a tie dye dress asked if she was looking for anything in particular. Anna ran her fingers over Eleanor’s turquoise stone in the pocket of her Old Navy raincoat and said, “Can you just tell me what to buy?”

Thirty minutes later, she left with Your Crystals and You and a small velvet bag of crystals.

In the days leading up to the eclipse, Anna studied the book, particularly the sections about the heart chakra and “Rare Lunar Events.”

She kept it in the back of her closet where no one would find it. As Dennis flipped through its pages, she felt uncomfortably exposed.

Anna took her glasses on and off, watching the moon progress across the sun. When it was about halfway across, she tapped Dennis’s arm and told him to look. He was less interested now and went back to reading Your Crystals and You. She tried not to track Eleanor’s location and gave into her own curiosity only once. The dot had moved slightly to the left. Anna wondered if that meant she had gotten a snack from the kitchen, or went to the bathroom, or fed the dog.

“So this is, like, a love spell.” Dennis gestured at the circle.

“What?”

“You’re doing a love spell. That’s what this is saying, right?” He held up the book.

“I mean, not exactly. Not really. This isn’t Wicca.”

“Okay. Sorry. I didn’t realize there was a difference.”

Anna checked the sun again. The moon had turned it into a golden crescent. The sky had begun to

go dim. “This is what they said it would look like. Like a sunset, but from all sides.”

“So who is it for?”

“No one.”

“You didn’t just randomly pick a love spell from a whole book about crystals.”

“It’s not a love spell.”

“Okay, whatever, heart spell. Lust spell. Crush spell. Who is it?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Is it someone I know? Someone at Kroger?”

“No. Can we just watch the eclipse?” From every direction, the horizon was turning yellow-orange, like an evening closing in prematurely on the afternoon. The fluorescent Walmart sign glowed against the gray sky. The crescent sun folded into itself. The air was already slightly cooler.

“I literally cannot imagine anyone ever rejecting you,” Dennis said.

Anna tried to pretend she hadn’t heard him.

Of course he did not know what he was talking about.

She remembered the calm, level tone of Eleanor’s voice as she said she loved her but had to do what felt right, as if their relationship could be neatly folded up with the rest of Eleanor’s things and loaded into her parents’ car. And then, how Eleanor had looked at her like she was her own shadow.

Dennis’s voice brought her back to the present.

“I just like, I think you’re really cool, and funny and smart, and I just imagine you would be, like, the best girlfriend.”

It was all too much. She pitied him for the awkward way he moved, his constant German at the register, his fixation on the games on his phone, and more than anything, the intent stare he gave her now.

Her eyes met his for a moment, then flitted away. He was beginning to blush.

It was embarrassing how much he liked her, how long he stared, but even more humiliating to remember how often she had looked at Eleanor like that. The receiving end was worse, because from here Anna could see the truth: if he really knew her and the dreariness of her life, he would have lost interest a long time ago.

“And like, all of this—” Dennis gestured to the crystal circle “—is kind of crazy, but whoever you’re doing it for is incredibly lucky.”

Anna looked down at her crystals. She picked up a piece of lapis lazuli and held it in her fist.

It was cool and smooth against her skin like egg long ago fallen from its nest. It was perfectly still,

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Elena Ruiz

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lifeless, without vibration. She was suddenly regretful of all the money she’d spent on the circle around her. For all she knew, Eleanor was right, and crystals did hold some unseen energy. But that energy wasn’t made for Anna.

Dennis’s face and neck were bright red.

“Sometimes after we work together, and you know, we bag for each other and talk and everything, I just go home and think about everything you said and did and I can’t focus on anything else. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No. I’ve never felt like that.”

“Really? And you’re still doing all of this?”

Anna put her glasses on and stared upward as the moon inched over the sun. She watched it for a while, hiding inside the almost-black world of the eclipse.

Finally he said, “Did I make this weird? I don’t want it to be weird.”

Anna kept her glasses on, kept looking at the orange crescent of the sun until her head began to hurt.

When she took them off and reemerged, the landscape around them had grown dark.

Dennis was unwrapping plastic from one half of a sandwich. He began eating and left the other half in the plastic on the ground. “They didn’t have chicken. I hope you like roast beef.”

The sky went dark. It surprised Anna with how swiftly it changed. The corona of the sun was white behind the black moon, as if it was gasping for air.

Everyone began to stir. Some boys high-fived each other. Children screamed and hollered.

Anna leapt from the ground and stretched her hands into the afternoon night. She stepped out of the circle, stepped back in, stepped out again. Dennis got up as well, still holding his sandwich, and grinned at her.

“This is wild, when you think about it,” he said.

“Like, that all it takes is the moon to block out the sun.

I mean, the sun would beat the moon in a fight ten times out of ten. Everyone fucking knows it. But here we are.”

They stared at the parking lot and the people and each other in awe. There hadn’t been an eclipse over Ohio in decades and there wouldn’t be another for many more. Anna could hardly believe she was spending this moment with Dennis. She laughed out loud, then covered her mouth. He pretended not to notice. She could hardly believe she was spending this moment with anyone, and that Eleanor was somewhere else, experiencing it without her.

All of a sudden, it was over. The moon had crept far enough across the sun that another crescent appeared on the opposite side. The sky was immediately brighter. Anna sat in the circle again, accidentally knocking a crystal out of place. She repositioned it, then pointed to the other half of Dennis’s sandwich.

“Is that still up for grabs?”

He nodded. When Anna took the sandwich in her hands, it felt lukewarm and moist, an unknown juice leaking out from the bottom end. She took a bite and then another because she was hungry, but then stopped. The bread, turning soggy from the mustard, stuck to the roof of her mouth, its taste lingering too long. She put the sandwich on the ground.

“How much longer do you want to stay?” asked Dennis.

Everyone was beginning to pack up their things and leave. The taco truck had pulled a metal cover over its front. Just ahead, a woman packed up a small cooler. Next to her, a young girl with wispy blonde pigtails held glasses against her face, still staring at the sun. A smaller boy sucked his thumb and tugged at her shirt.

“Lily, give Aidan a turn,” the woman said.

The girl leaned down to eye level with the boy and tried to position them on his face. He jerked away from her and frowned. “You have to wear them,” the girl said. “Or else you’ll be looking at the eclipse forever.”

Dennis looked up from his game. “I lost,” he said. “Wanna go now?”

Anna pointed to her crystals. “We need a little more time.” She pressed her hands against the asphalt and stared at the impression left on her palms until it faded away.

“Okay, just tell me when.”

The sky was growing bright again, returning to normal. A line of cars formed at the edge of the parking lot. They had seen what they had come to see, and it was time to go. Anna was still, hardly breathing, her legs heavy underneath her. She wondered how long she could sit like that, and if she would ever be ready to leave.

Scale Paintings by Rand Burnette p. 31 “Mars”, “Mountains” p. 32 “Rand”, “Cicada” p. 33 “Cell”, “Atom” 30

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Thoughts on Jesus’s Microbiome

by Sutton Amthor

A question: What was the nature of Jesus Christ’s microbes? Were they ordinary microbes, suited to Jesus’s ordinary human body? Or were they, like him, imbued with divinity, themselves fully microbial and fully divine? When Jesus was resurrected, were they resurrected with him? And--perhaps most importantly--does it matter, one way or another?

These are questions that would be better suited for Thomas Aquinas. If we want the truth, we should ask learned theologians and knowledgeable microbiologists. However, in matters of faith, “truth” is a flexible thing. We can’t exactly send emails to God asking him to explain the nature of his creation. In place of certainty, we believe what we find we must, picking up pieces of personal theology from our parents and our books and our friends. I am not a biologist or a theologian. I am merely a self-proclaimed heretic, increasingly suspicious of institutionalized religion, who was spiritually changed by taking a microbiology class. I know very little about the different strands of Christian thought regarding the nature of Jesus’ humanity, and I know even less about microbiology. I am not “qualified” to answer this question, but I don’t need to be. This is merely what I believe.

Every human serves as the host for about 100 trillion microbes. The question of Jesus’s microbes hinges on the nature of our relationship with our microbes. Either we are simply humans, bound to our microbes in a mutually beneficial relationship, but nevertheless a completely separate entity; or we are a ​holobiont​, the entire community consisting of our macrobial human body and 100 trillion microbial bodies. Our consciousness, spirit, life force, or whatever you want to call it, either stems from our human cells and nothing else, or it stems from our human cells​in combination with​our microbes’ cells. What we call a human may not really be just a human at all, but the sum total of one human and millions of microbes.

If humans are simply humans and our microbes are simply microbes, there would be no reason for Jesus’s microbes to be divine at all. Jesus walked on earth with a human body, his divine aspect relegated to spirit/soul/consciousness. If his microbes had no part in the makeup of his consciousness, the proximity of Jesus’s divinity wouldn’t be enough to elevate these totally separate creatures to a divine level. They would be merely microbes and nothing more.

If, on the other hand, humans are actually holobionts, the story changes entirely. If Jesus’s microbes had a share in his divine consciousness, they would likewise ​have ​to be divine. In this case,

there are two separate entities we have to consider: Jesus-the-human and Jesus-the microbes (really ​ millions ​of separate entities), both imbued with the entirety of God’s divine nature.

When I’ve talked to devout Christians about these ideas, I’ve been met with enthusiasm and interest, but I’ve also been met with scorn. I’ve been told that considering these things reduces the story of Jesus to “silliness.” I’ve been told that Jesus-the-microbes aren’t worth considering. But the existence of Jesus-the-microbes has broader implications for the nature of the world we live in, for one important reason: Microbes tend to move from host to host.

There’s no way to stop this from happening; it is a side effect of being a creature that interacts with the world through physical contact. Jesus-the-microbes wouldn’t have been exempt from this rule. They wouldn’t have stayed in one place, content to live and die with Jesus-the-human.

Once you realize that, the entire story of Jesus-God-incarnate looks a little bit different, and suddenly every instance of Jesus interacting with the world through touch becomes incredibly important.

And Jesus does a ​lot​of touching in the gospels--when he is baptized, when he heals the sick with his hands, when he shares meals with his disciples, these are all moments where Jesus-the-microbes are transferred to other human beings. Then there’s the passion narrative, chock full of close, often brutal, bodily contact.

Judas’s kiss of betrayal.

Fragrant Love

by Beimnet Kassaye I, Love as strong as an acid, Love as organic as carboxylic.

She, Sweet as dilute alcohol, As consensual as volatile.

In those hot days of summer, And the world’s constant hygroscopy, Our bodies would touch and cleave, Bonds would break; pieces leave.

Remember I still do, Of the way we reacted, Releasing vapor as we condensed.

Both our bodies lose sourness Esterify into fragrance Exuding our holy scent For others to bottle and perfume.

Only to undo the whole thing To return to status quo All it took was for time For time to add a trickle.

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Mauck In, Mauck Out

by Miriam Hyman

Tacked to the corkboard outside Bob Mauck’s office hangs a noir-inspired comic, pen-drawn by his daughter, Katie. The comic is set on Kent Island, a small research station owned by Bowdoin college where Bob Mauck has spent the past thirty years studying storm petrels. Katie Mauck was four when she spent her first summer there. Every year afterwards, her family would make the twenty-five hour trek from Ohio to spend their summer at the research station. It was a long journey, but the adventure really started when they arrived at the island, which was stuck somewhere in the 1800s and couldn’t break free. There was no running water, no electricity, internet or cars. Enshrouded in fog, the island moved in time with the tides.

When it went out, Katie could walk to the next island without getting her feet wet, picking barnacles off of the old fishing weirs that stuck out of the sediment like small circular fences. Over the summers, the student researchers, faculty and family lived in flat-board New-England style houses, sleeping on summer-camp-bunks cushioned by sleeping bags. They ate communally, sharing meals prepared by the resident cook, who had to schedule around grocery shipments from the main island which arrived by boat every two weeks, along with letters and the occasional visitor.

“My entire childhood was centered around this place” Katie recalls.

“Every assignment in school I would write about Kent island. All of my journals from 8th grade were yet another thing about Kent island. It’s my favorite place in the world. It really teaches you how to exist in community and how to unplug. We played a lot of board games, card games, everyone brought a bunch of books. It was so expensive to call because nobody had cell-phones at that time. It was like a dollar or two a minute. We had a radio, so we could radio the fishermen when there was an emergency, but mostly we wrote letters, and then the letters would come every time the boat arrived.”

Although ornithologists flocked the island, it was Katie’s creative space. The storm petrels from her father’s research inspired comics instead of research questions. “There was always an artist in residence from Bowdoin up there every summer, and I grew up very artistically inclined so I would write stories and I would paint, and I would do all these things. I thought I was going to major in the arts, humanities or social sciences. Science wasn’t something that I felt was my calling.”

Now, Katie Mauck sits in her new office on the second floor of Tomsich. She rifles through a filing cabinet looking for the science writing syllabus she’d kept from her PhD work at Northwestern. “I was very interested in science writing,” she tells me. “I considered it as a career.” Instead, she landed on physical chemistry. In Fall of 2019, Dr. Katie Mauck began as Kenyon’s newest chemistry faculty. She is one of three women in the department.

On the Kenyon website her research is described as the “characterization of the vibrational and electronic properties of optically active semiconductor materials.” This seems a far cry from the artistic career she envisioned as a child, but Katie tells me she sees a definite connection between her scientific and creative work.

“The moment for me when I was like “chemistry is cool and something that I want to do with my life” was when I was using instrumentation to solve real problems and do hands on work. After college I was a synthetic

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chemist at a nanotechnology startup. I was working with my hands every day making something, and the things that I was making were luminescent semiconductor nanocrystals. It really fed into my interest in art. I was getting to make colors every day that glowed. At parties, people would ask ‘What do you do?’ and I’d say ‘I make light.’ Which wasn’t really true, I was making UV light visible. But it was really colorful and fun. I was in charge of making red non-cadmium containing quantum dots, that’s what these nanoparticles are called, and I did that every day for two years. I found it really fulfilling to work with my hands every day and create something.”

Although Katie’s degrees are in chemistry, her research and interests lend themselves to physics. When I ask her why she chose to pursue chemistry instead of physics, Katie tells me it’s because physics wasn’t required at her high school.

“Chemistry was required, so I didn’t have to say ‘I’m interested in this’ or ‘I’m good at this’ in order to take it. Once I took chemistry I realized ‘Oh, this is what I like. I really like balancing equations and doing this type of math to describe chemical transformations.’ But I didn’t think ‘this means I’m a scientist’ or ‘I should go do science.’ I thought I wasn’t good at math and my strength was writing and I would do something totally different.

But now I’m basically doing physics. That’s what my research is essentially. I wish that I had taken more math because it would make things easier now. I

should have taken physics in high school.”

When I ask Katie to recall a moment that pivoted her from a future in the arts to the sciences, I’m expecting to hear about her high-school chemistry class. Instead, she brings me back to the summer of 2004, when she was the cook on Kent Island. It was Bob Mauck’s first year as director and now biology-faculty Iris Levin was back for her second summer, continuing the undergraduate research on savannah sparrows she’d started with Toshi Tsunekage the year prior. The summer Katie was the cook, she split the gig with another daughter of Kent Island, and did research half-time in the mornings for the naturalist Chuck Huntington. At 16, it was the first time she’d participated in “real science” at the research station.

“I was comfortable with the petrels, because I had grown up handling them with my dad. At first I was just taking data, recording it and entering it into a database, but I didn’t have a concept of what that lead to or why it mattered really. By the end of the summer I started having those kinds of conversations because everyone was going to give a final presentation about their work.”

“I remember that my dad sat down with me and we came up with a probability chart trying to analyze what the data we had taken meant.

It became a real back and forth where I had ideas and I was talking about them. None of my findings were exciting or conclusive in any way, but it was that moment, mapping out the probabilities, using

Kent Island group photo, Summer of 2003. Bob Mauck is top far left. To his right is Toshi Tsunekage and Katie Mauck. Third from top right is Iris Levin.

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math to understand the natural world, that basically changed everything for me and oriented me towards chemistry. Which is using math to understand the atomic makeup of our world, how energy moves around. Doing that, as we did with animal behavior but on this even more granular level that to me was more intellectually satisfying. Soon afterwards I took chemistry and realized “this is like that probability chart, except for something that is more measurable.”

Fast forward sixteen years and Katie Mauck, Iris Levin and Toshi Tsunekage are all navigating their first semester of teaching at Kenyon. It’s been a while since any of them have gone back to Kent Island, and when they do go, it’s not the same. Bob Mauck, who still makes the trip every summer, laments that the immediacy of the place was lost with the introduction of internet and cell. “The experience wasn’t just about science. It was also about living in a different way. When you went to do research, you had to do all of your prep beforehand because you couldn’t just go online and answer your questions. By the same token, when you were doing research and came across a problem you had to talk to the other people on the island to figure it out. I really relished that.” His daughter has a more pragmatic take. “Many of us old timers feel very strongly that it ruins the vibe - but times change.”

Katie glances at one of the Kent Island photos she’s pulled up on her phone. “It’s a different reality that we’re living in now, especially with academic science, than we were back then.”

At Kenyon too, it’s the end of an era. After twenty years teaching at Kenyon, Bob is getting ready to retire. When he leaves, Katie’s petrel comic will be taken down and Kenyon students will no longer join him for summer research on Kent Island. In many ways, the Kent Island Katie describes to me as her favorite place on earth is more present at Kenyon than anywhere else. Iris, Toshi and Katie all recall the Island as if they are still there. For Iris and Toshi, Kent Island is alive in their partnership and research. Soon, they will be taking students to study barn-swallows in Mongolia and China over the summers, continuing the research on birds that they started as undergraduates seventeen years ago.

When she recalls her childhood growing up on Kent Island, Katie remembers the community.

As expected for someone with such diverse talents, Katie’s petrel research on Kent island didn’t commit her to the sciences, but it did forge the bridge that lead her from painting to synthesizing light. As she grew into adulthood, Katie experimented with both art and science, figuring out what she did and didn’t

like. After undergrad at Oberlin, Katie worked at a quantum dot nanotechnology startup, and then at the Musee National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship before getting her PhD at Northwestern in chemistry. For fun, she sang in a renaissance polyphony choir and continued making art, although it was harder to find the time. “Ultimately I found that physical chemistry combined with synthetic chemistry and experimental analytical techniques has been the thing that interests me the most”.

While Katie’s interests have evolved, the community Katie grew up with on Kent Island has remained foundational. “I learned so much about community and how important that is to me. I think that has continued to guide me in everything I’ve sought out since then. I saw how undergrads were given opportunities to take on research projects on their own and their strong feeling of ownership over them. The seriousness with which people were interested in what they were doing and their devotion to it made an impression on me. It’s largely why I went to Oberlin and why I sought out a liberal arts environment.”

Dr. Katie Mauck hopes to bring the academic, artistic community she fell in love with on Kent Island to her teaching and mentorship at Kenyon.

She’s also looking forward to taking classes at the art barn and joining one of Kenyon’s music ensembles. Before I leave, Katie mentions that after years of snubbing biology, she’s becoming interested in birds. “It’s only now that I know the chemistry behind stuff that I become fascinated by how that manifests in nature and in animals. I would love to know a lot more about birds. Birds and plants I think are really cool.” Then, she backtracks. “I’m not going to do animals; I want to do botany.”

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