The Malesardi Quad presents a strikingly serene scene on a wintry day.
The Malesardi Quad presents a strikingly serene scene on a wintry day.
by Bryan Wendell
David Lundy ’21, a chemical engineering and economics double major from Freehold, N.J., landed a coveted spot in the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges Scholars Program. Offered at just 74 schools in the United States, the program has a laudable but lofty goal: Use engineering to conquer 14 of the world’s toughest problems.
Lundy chose the challenge “Engineer Better Medicines” because he’s fascinated by the journey a vaccine takes from 200-milliliter beaker to 200-liter bioreactor.
David Lundy ’21, a chemical engineering and economics double major from Freehold, N.J., landed a coveted spot in the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges Scholars Program. Offered at just 74 schools in the United States, the program has a laudable but lofty goal: Use engineering to conquer 14 of the world’s toughest problems.
Lundy chose the challenge “Engineer Better Medicines” because he’s fascinated by the journey a vaccine takes from 200-milliliter beaker to 200-liter bioreactor.
by Brooke Thames
While Williams’ work with plants has been marked by adventure, it’s also included moments when she’s been followed and questioned about her presence in public parks — experiences that too often come with the territory of “botanizing while Black,” she says. So in July, Williams spearheaded #BlackBotanistsWeek, a Twitter campaign to uplift Black and Indigenous botanists and open dialogue around prejudice that scientists of color face.
While Williams’ work with plants has been marked by adventure, it’s also included moments when she’s been followed and questioned about her presence in public parks — experiences that too often come with the territory of “botanizing while Black,” she says. So in July, Williams spearheaded #BlackBotanistsWeek, a Twitter campaign to uplift Black and Indigenous botanists and open dialogue around prejudice that scientists of color face.
Editor’s note: Wish granted.
See Page 18.
Albuquerque, N.M.
’ray Bucknell!
Blue Bell, Pa.
Check out the digital edition here magazine.bucknell.edu
Rochester, Minn.
As I write this editor’s note two days before Thanksgiving, I reflect on this same task, in the same time frame, last year. The coverline for our Winter 2020 issue was “Betting on Hope,” and my editor’s note was titled “High Hopes.” When I wrote those lines, there was no hint that a deadly virus was soon to creep in, then explode around the world.
In today’s New York Times these are the numbers: 59.3 million cases, 1.3 million deaths worldwide, in the U.S., more than 250,000 casualties. I’ve known one of them, a fit, middle-aged man who became a “long hauler” (someone who could not shake the virus after months of physical decline) who ended his COVID journey in a Jewish cemetery near Philadelphia. My husband and I miss Rick, and many of you also miss someone who should still be with us.
magazine
Volume 14, Issue 1
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The charter, written by Stephen W. Taylor, described a primary school, academy and college called the University at Lewisburg. On Valentine’s Day 1846, news of the future school appeared in the Lewisburg Chronicle, and the Board of Trustees met for the first time.
Taylor, a former professor at Madison University (now Colgate in New York), was the mastermind behind the University, planning and setting up the school and recommending that a $100,000 endowment — a massive sum in those days — be raised to start the University. He established a precursor several months after the charter became official — teaching, alongside his son Alfred, at a new preparatory school in the basement of the First Baptist Church.
Frederick, Md.
When biology major Paige Caine ’21 began studying RNA — genetic material similar to DNA — in early spring, the emergence of a novel coronavirus was still a world away. Little did Caine know that this summer, her research would land her at a medical lab in her home state of Maryland, where she helped test for COVID-19 using science she learned at Bucknell.
Danville, Pa.
Startup Lewisburg has been a home to business innovators in the Central Susquehanna Valley for the last seven years, providing access to consulting services, broadband internet and exclusive networking opportunities. Now Bucknell’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC) has added a second Startup office in nearby Danville.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May, a burgeoning anti-racism effort has gained momentum at Bucknell. At the forefront of the movement is Associate Provost of Equity & Inclusive Excellence Thelathia “Nikki” Young and the 10 diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) groups that she has initiated across campus.
The Athletics Department’s DEI Council is a 10-member mix of coaches, administrators and students led by Maisha Kelly, senior associate athletics director/senior woman administrator. Kelly pulls double duty on the newly formed Patriot League Anti-racism Commission, which also includes Professors Coralynn Davis and Emily Martin, Head Men’s Basketball Coach Nathan Davis, Young and Abby Kapp ’21.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recognizes that problems like these are too big for any one discipline to fully address and is now looking to Bucknell, where top-tier engineering and liberal arts programs coalesce, as a model for nurturing a new generation of broadly trained and aware engineers ready to meet these and other global challenges head on.
In September, NSF awarded a grant of nearly $2 million from its Revolutionizing Engineering Departments program to Professor Alan Cheville, the T. Jefferson Miers Chair in Electrical Engineering, and four co-researchers from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering: Professors Robert Nickel, Stu Thompson, Stewart Thomas and Rebecca Thomas.
Du Mez analyzes the intertwined theological commitments and cultural trends that have led most white evangelical Christians to idealize militant masculinity. Fearful of changing gender norms and attacks upon America’s ostensible Christian heritage, these evangelicals have embraced leaders who promise to protect their religious interests and to promote Christian nationalism. Du Mez suggests that white evangelicals’ overwhelming support for Donald Trump represents a predictable consequence rather than an abandonment of their values.
With so many engaging academic books being published, I lament that I have read few novels over the past decade. Atwood’s dystopian portrayal of the Republic of Gilead has reminded me of the appeal and power of fiction. Based upon her studies of early American Puritanism and written in the 1980s against the backdrop of the rise of the Religious Right, Atwood’s novel remains relevant through its exploration of themes of environmental crises, theocratic totalitarianism and patriarchal power.
Because I am both a scholar of American religion and an active Anabaptist Christian, my academic and theological interests often overlap in books like this one, which addresses Christians’ responsibilities to promote peace and justice. Drawing upon Anabaptist and Black theology, Hart challenges communities of faith to become organized and active in confronting white supremacy and economic injustice. He reminds Christian readers of the radical possibilities for social change if they commit to living and loving like Jesus did.
Public Writing for Media
The news is such a massive facet of our daily existence. We’re bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information, much of it delivered by talking heads trying to tell us which facts actually matter and how they should be interpreted. My course focuses on the rhetorical techniques used in the media sphere to advance a certain point of view. My students and I read the daily news online in light of the principles of classical rhetoric to identify how news articles draw from some tried-and-true formulas for persuasive argumentation. I then teach students how to apply those formulas to their academic writing.
When Susan Dudt ’24 tells people that she’s a competitive curler, she hears one of two responses.
“Some think it’s cool, because they’ve seen it in the Olympics,” she says, “but most times they really don’t know what the sport is.”
Its origins dating to 16th-century Scotland, curling is a mix of brain and brawn, with a vernacular all its own. In short, four-person teams push a hunk of polished granite down an icy “sheet,” trying to land the “stone” in the “house” — a bulls-eye 150 feet away. A stone’s landing spot can also strategically block an opponent’s efforts to hit the bulls-eye.
When it comes to efficiency, good enough is never enough for Steve Durfee, Bucknell’s campus energy manager. He’s constantly on the hunt for ways to make the University more sustainable, whether it’s replacing more than 35,000 lightbulbs around campus with LEDs in the last two years or a $5-million chiller plant upgrade to cool campus buildings with less energy. Now, in the grip of winter, Durfee offers tips for reducing your utility bills.ver since college, Casey Barber ’00 has been that friend everyone turns to for cooking advice. “I was probably the only person who came to Bucknell with a MultiPot and tongs, and was actually cooking on those rickety, electric-burner dorm stoves,” she laughs. “And during Thanksgiving I’m like my own Butterball hotline.”
The art history and English major has turned her passion into a career — as a food writer, illustrator and photographer. In recent months, she wrote and illustrated a feature for Better Homes & Gardens about food she ate while road tripping from Chicago to California; wrote a story for the website The Kitchn about getting her carnivore of a husband to eat more vegetarian fare during quarantine; and updated a post on her food website, Good. Food. Stories., about an especially memorable pasta dish she made as an undergrad after moving into off-campus housing and having a proper kitchen for the first time. She’s also authored two cookbooks: Classic Snacks Made from Scratch: 70 Homemade Versions of Your Favorite Brand-Name Treats and Pierogi Love: New Takes on an Old-World Comfort Food. (Barber hails from western Pennsylvania, so naturally, she says, “Pierogies are life.”)
But then the chief, Steve Barilar, learned something that made it worse: Tomorrow was her birthday. Making things as stress-free as possible is always priority one when Barilar or his officers move students to isolation housing, but in this case, he knew something extra was in order.
The next morning the student awoke to an email from Jackie Cetera, director of residential education, asking her to open the door to her room. Waiting on the doorstep was a gift basket filled with skin-care products (“like a miniature spa day,” Cetera says), along with birthday balloons and a bamboo plant to help the isolation room feel a little more like home.
“Dana Mims [Events Management], Jeff Loss [Facilities] and Steve Barilar [Public Safety] all stepped up to support this,” she says. In a matter of days, “We were able to have a tent set up, tables and a refrigerator — a whole remote testing site.”
Employees were divided into four groups based on contact with the campus community, with all working on campus tested at least once and as frequently as every two weeks for high-contact workers, including faculty.
In late June, after three months of exclusively virtual admissions experiences, Bucknell resumed in-person visits for prospective students and their families.
With the start of the fall semester still two months away, other campus offices had more time to design reopening plans. The Office of Admissions did not.
While most colleges remained closed to visitors, Dean of Admissions Kevin Mathes ’07 led the effort to open Bucknell while keeping visitors and the admissions team safe and healthy.
For Buckell’s Facilities division, however, a few things were absolutely certain: Students, faculty and staff would return, and allowing them to do so safely required preparations on a scale none had encountered before.
“By April, there was already a sense that we were coming back,” says Deb Smith, an operations area manager who oversees nearly 40 custodial staff. “We’re a school that has in-person classes; we’re not an online school, and we don’t necessarily want to be one. That was a really important principle through the whole process.”
during move-in week
Twenty-one years later, on this fall’s move-in day, the rain was absent but so were the helpers. Because of the pandemic, each student could select just one family member to help carry belongings inside.
The changes didn’t end there. Face coverings were mandatory. Move-in day became move-in week with students registering in two-hour windows spread across five days. And before receiving a room key, students were required to provide proof of two successive negative COVID-19 tests.
“You could look at this situation a million different ways, but many of us have chosen to see it as a chance to find exciting, new ideas to keep students engaged and supported,” says Sabrina Shankar, assistant director of student activities.
Shankar oversees Bucknell’s 7th Street Studio & Makerspace, a hub for extracurricular arts that was one of many on-campus spaces challenged to reimagine its events and activities. Rather than sitting shoulder-to-shoulder making crafts with community art supplies, students used individually packaged materials at outdoor pop-up sessions and weekend night events. Crafts ranged from simple pleasures, such as mug painting and bullet journaling, to laser-cutting Bucknell- themed door decor.
But that initial panic didn’t last long. When faced with charting a roadmap through unprecedented territory, Breeding was quick to respond with an unwavering resolve to “make it happen — fast.”
“Since dining locations were going to be some of the only large gathering spaces left, we knew we had to get it exactly right,” he says. “There’d be no days where we could relax, no such thing as ‘close enough.’ Because if we messed up … well, there wasn’t room for messing up.”
photograph by Shayan Asgharnia
These immortal words of boxer Mike Tyson precisely describe what happened to us last spring. We got punched in the mouth, big time. The arrival of COVID-19 rocked all of our worlds, and our heads are still spinning from that punch. But we’re still on our feet.
At Bucknell, as I write this in late October, week 11 of the fall semester, we are seeing a rise in positive COVID-19 cases, with 10 active cases — nine students and one employee. Since Aug. 17, when classes began, we’ve administered nearly 35,000 tests, with 29 positive cases.
Submit your own photos to Bucknell Magazine by contacting your class reporter or emailing classnotes@bucknell.edu
Poetry and activism intertwine in Again, a book of poems by Jennifer Perrine M’03 published this fall. Composed over a couple of months in early 2017, the 48 poems explore the state of the nation following a disruptive 2016 presidential election.
Writing in a compressed time frame — and with a cohesive focus — is a departure for Perrine, a recipient of prestigious writing fellowships and poetry prizes such as the Diana Cox Award for Images of Women in Popular Culture and the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award. The book’s sociopolitical theme is in keeping with the poet’s three prior volumes, which explored gender, sexuality and violence.
Making poetry available through shows such The Occasion and former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown podcast helps to remedy the lack of connection most people have to poetry outside of a classroom, Perrine says.
“Even now, there are still public readings, and, in some ways, those readings are even more accessible, because people can just get online to view them,” Perrine says.
His career path would probably surprise his Bucknell classmates. A biology major, Johnson didn’t consider a legal career until his senior year, when a friend challenged him to take the LSAT and see who would do better. After getting what he says was “a shockingly high” score, Johnson thought, “maybe I have an aptitude that fits with the law.”
“I expected that I’d choose a practical major that would lead to a practical career,” Kauffman says. “But I couldn’t ignore the feeling that I wasn’t meant to be part of a corporate structure but out in the world making some sort of social impact instead.”
Through these two foundational experiences I found my “voice” in the Bucknell community and earned the moniker “Easy Ed,” for my laid-back demeanor and a proclivity for persuasion over confrontation. These roles also served as catalysts for building my confidence and nurturing deep personal relationships across a wide spectrum of students, faculty, staff, administrators, trustees, alumni and parents. Whether the people I met during this critical juncture remained in my life for several decades or only intersected briefly, these bonds have influenced who I am and how I experience others.
“That experience made me realize that I wanted to work in higher education,” she says. “It all started at Bucknell.”
“We think of adaptation not just from an ecological perspective but from a public-safety perspective,” she says. “It’s not just about managing the forests and reducing fuel for fires but educating communities and homeowners on how to prepare for this type of event.”
As a child growing up near Philadelphia, Blamah Sarnor ’06 would hear stories about the aunts and uncles he never met — the ones who were killed in the civil war in Liberia.
His mother, Roseline Queh-Sarnor, grew up in the West African country but came to the United States on a college scholarship. She couldn’t predict the chaos and bloodshed that would ravage her homeland when a civil war began in 1989. The atrocities would claim some of her family and loved ones. “It was very tough hearing what my mother went through,” Sarnor says.
The second part? Well, that’s pretty on the mark.
Dunne’s company, Kaya Kopi, imports and sells kopi luwak, a coffee that’s fermented in the bellies of civets, which are called luwaks in the Indonesian language and sometimes mistakenly considered cats. He sources it from a plantation in West Java, Indonesia.
Wild civets there eat coffee cherries and digest the outer fruit, leaving the seeds (what we call beans) behind in their dung for workers to collect, clean and roast. Flavors vary with the type and origin of beans, but Dunne’s coffee has a hint of cacao on the nose, a lemony bite on the tongue and a silky, acid-free finish.
Charlotte Keiser Malick, Aug. 18, Middletown, Pa.
Fred Griffin, Aug. 29, Westfield, N.J.
Mark Henry P’76, Sept. 3, Hummelstown, Pa.
Alice Lewry Kells, Aug. 26, Thurmont, Md.
Courtney Tusing, July 26, Baker, W.Va.
Herald Keiser, Aug. 31, Milton, Pa.
Philip Marcus, July 13, Palm Coast, Fla.
Don Minnigan, June 30, Nashville, Tenn.
A former chair of the history department, Kirkland’s special interests were European and intellectual history. He also taught interdepartmental courses, particularly in political science, and read manuscripts for the Bucknell University Press as a member of its editorial board.
Raised in Atlanta, Schwartz earned a bachelor’s in applied physics from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1983 and was an optical engineer in the defense field in his early career. He returned to his alma mater for a master’s in management in 1990, then earned a Ph.D. with a focus on finance at the University of Georgia in 1995.
Estie Pyper ’16 is a newsworthy exception. She was a few weeks into a job as a production assistant on Early Today, the NBC News show that starts long before sunrise, when it hit her like a jolt of espresso.
“I just fell in love with it,” Pyper says. “It clicked for me that production was what I wanted to do, because it combined my love for theatre and my love for writing. And I’m like, ‘Why didn’t I realize this before?’ ”
Pyper is now an associate producer for Morning Joe, MSNBC’s flagship morning program hosted by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist. She’s still working extreme hours but now starts at 2 a.m. instead of 10 p.m.
Reunion edition
What was your toughest course?
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Contributions from our community will document and preserve Bucknell’s history during the pandemic and will help future researchers better understand the challenges faced. Send questions or stories to scua@bucknell.edu.
to join the conversation.
ARIZONA
Bucknell Club of Arizona
Stephanie Moulton Fornoff ’96
luvlfe@aol.com
CALIFORNIA
Bucknell Club of Los Angeles
Emily Baker ’08
emilycbaker@gmail.com
Bucknell Club of Northern California
Jonathan Como ’14
jonathan.como@gmail.com
Bucknell Club of Denver
Sharon Muli ’11
sharonl.muli@gmail.com
CONNECTICUT
Bucknell Club of Fairfield & Westchester Counties
Scott Singer ’87
ssinger65@gmail.com
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
Bucknell Club of Washington, D.C.
Wes Pyron ’12
wes.pyron@gmail.com
The first is a virtual tour that begins with a meticulously detailed rendering of Bucknell, with options to view campus at the height of fall’s splendor or on those magical mornings after a fresh snow. From there, you can go inside buildings through videos and stunning photography or explore engineering more deeply in a separate tour.
The second is College Admissions Insider, a new podcast that offers a glimpse behind the curtain of college admissions. In half-hour episodes every two weeks, hosts Bryan Wendell and Brooke Thames interview admissions officers to bring prospective students and families expert advice for their college search. Whether someone in your life is preparing for college or you just want to discover all that goes into “getting in,” you’re invited to listen and subscribe in your favorite podcast app.
Discover both at the links below, and follow @BucknellU on social media to be the first to know when new experiences debut.
Mary Samori Moran ’86
From a very young age, DIANA “DEE” SHERMAN KASH ’64 loved playing games — for fun as well as the camaraderie of playing with others. Kash, who lives in California, grew up in Pittsburgh, where her family enjoyed playing cards and board games. The family tradition lives on, with her two grandchildren sometimes joining in. Two years ago, a friend told Kash about mahjong. Now she’s hooked on this ancient game, which is played with 152 tiles with designs based on Chinese characters and symbols.
From a very young age, DIANA “DEE” SHERMAN KASH ’64 loved playing games — for fun as well as the camaraderie of playing with others. Kash, who lives in California, grew up in Pittsburgh, where her family enjoyed playing cards and board games. The family tradition lives on, with her two grandchildren sometimes joining in. Two years ago, a friend told Kash about mahjong. Now she’s hooked on this ancient game, which is played with 152 tiles with designs based on Chinese characters and symbols.
photograph by EMILY PAINE
photograph by EMILY PAINE