“Seleucia” has seen better days. One of her eyes is missing, as well as her entire body, which somehow became detached from her alabaster and stucco head at some point during the past 2,000 years of her existence.

No matter. She’s still quite sought after. So much so that Leah Niederstadt, Wheaton assistant professor of museum studies/art history and permanent collection curator, carefully carried the ancient sculpture head on a trip in May. She personally delivered it to the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan at the request of museum officials seeking to borrow it from Wheaton’s permanent collection. The loan is for at least five years, with the possibility of renewal.

According to the museum’s curator Margaret Cool Root, the head will be a linchpin piece for an installation exhibition marking the opening of a newly constructed museum wing this month. It will be featured in a gallery that highlights many aspects of excavations that took place at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris between 1927 and 1937. Seleucia was a Hellenistic capital in what is now modern-day Iraq.

“This is interesting,” said Niederstadt, “because there are many amazing objects in our collection that are used a great deal by the Wheaton community, but aren’t known outside of the campus. So this is an opportunity for people to see what we have in the collection. And it is a beautiful little piece and in good physical condition, which is unusual to find.”

The head, which is small enough to fit into the palm of a hand, was excavated in 1931.

The excavations were conducted by the University of Michigan and co-sponsored by the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. While the University of Michigan retained a large portion of finds from Seleucia, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art each received small allocations reflecting their financial assistance to the expedition. A selection of some of the most remarkable and unique finds remained in Baghdad. The exhibition, which opened November 1, brings together the best of the collections in the United States.

“Of the several heads for attachment to statuettes that came to the U.S. institutions, the Wheaton head is the most visually striking; it is of the highest quality, and it boasts the best preservation,” said Root. “For these reasons alone, the Kelsey Museum was eager to incorporate it into our displays—reuniting significant artifacts from the excavations in one contextualized presentation.”

The Seleucia head was given to Wheaton in 1949 by the then director of the Toledo Museum as a gift in honor of Wilhelmina Van Ingen Elarth, an associate professor of history and art who taught at Wheaton from 1935 to 1946. She had previously worked at the University of Michigan and published Figurines from Seleucia on the Tigris in 1939, a copy of which is in the Wheaton archives.

Kelsey Museum officials had been keenly interested in getting the Seleucia head to figure out whether it matched a torso in the collection at the Toledo Museum of Art. Alas, it does not. Yet it is still fascinating.

“The Wheaton head was probably made 100 years or more before its final deposition,” said Root. “It was found as debris that had been swept up in the brickwork of a room dating to the latest level of the site—between A.D. 115 and 227…. A beautiful antiquity such as the Wheaton head would normally be viewed only as an isolated object of art on a pedestal in a museum gallery. In the Kelsey Museum display it will, however, be placed within a visual context of an amazing array of things found within the brickwork of Seleucia.”

The effort to constrain the link between global climate and determine how much of global warming has to do with natural geological processes will be furthered over the next couple of years by Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Geology Matthew Evans. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded him a $109,880 grant to investigate Himalayan hot springs and their long-term effect on the global carbon cycle.

Evans plans to take at least one Wheaton College student  with him to the Himalayas to help with research, which will be a collaborative effort between Wheaton and Cornell University. Undergraduate and graduate students from both schools also will do extensive laboratory work.

The research continues and expands collaborative work he conducted with colleagues while working on his dissertation at Cornell University. Evans and colleagues sampled geothermal springs in Nepal and found that they produce large amounts of carbon dioxide CO₂.

Traditionally, it has been thought that the formation of mountains reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide, through a series of chemical reactions in which CO₂ from the atmosphere combines with water to form a weak acid, which then breaks down minerals within these mountain belts, said Evans. However, his research of hot springs flowing on the southern flank of the Himalayan mountain range offers a different possibility.

“Our work has shown that the hot springs are bringing to the surface as much, if not more, CO₂ than is being removed by these chemical weathering processes,” he said. “Up to this point, delivery of CO₂ from mountain ranges hasn’t been considered a significant source. So this finding represents a significant shift in the current paradigm, and has impacts on our understanding of the relationship between tectonics, climate and the carbon cycle.”

The long-term climate record, said Evans, shows the extent of variability possible in the Earth system, from snowball to hothouse. “We need to understand how the carbon cycle and long-term global climate are related, even in the absence of humans, so that we can better estimate how the disturbances we are causing may impact the system.”

That understanding hinges on the ability to constrain the carbon sources and carbon “sinks” (places of accumulation). “Ultimately, Earth scientists are trying to figure out how the Earth works, and the linkage between mountain building, global climate and the carbon cycle is a great example of the dynamic Earth system.”

The carbon cycle, which plays a role in climate change, is the complex process in which CO₂ is removed from and emitted back into the atmosphere, ideally in a balanced way. Since the Industrial Revolution, concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere have greatly increased, largely due to human activities, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Scientists, as well as policy makers, have been keenly interested in the long-term impact on life on Earth.

Evans’s NSF grant will provide two years of financial backing for research. Much of the funding will go to support fieldwork in central and western Nepal, and in northwestern India, a new area for him.

The students that he will take to the Himalayas will help with sampling. The funding also should support at least two student research projects or senior theses, he said. A summer salary for students to help perform chemical analyses, and collect and synthesize the chemical data is also available.

“It’s really a very exciting opportunity, both for me and for Wheaton,” said Evans, a geochemist who uses water chemistry to examine geological processes at and near the Earth’s surface.

George Denhard served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Pensa, Burkina Faso from 1971 to 1973. Mollie grew up surrounded by the items he brought or sent home during his time of service in Africa. Now her long held interest in the objects has led her to curate an exhibition that includes some of the pieces. The exhibition titled Collecting in the Peace Corps: Tangible Memories of the Toughest Job You'll Ever Love opened October 18 and continues through December 11 in Beard Gallery. It focuses on objects collected by Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Burkina Faso.

“The prospect of another culture halfway around the world fascinates me,” said the studio art major. “Nearly two years ago I wrote a paper for a museum studies course titled “Basement Wonders: Bringing a Peace Corps Collection Out of Obscurity,” in which I examined my father’s Peace Corps experience and collection of items, and began to see correlations between the Peace Corps and collecting. My museum studies professor, Leah Niederstadt, suggested that we turn the idea into a gallery exhibition.

“I was, and still am, fascinated by the concept of the Peace Corps and collecting. All volunteers must have brought at least a few things home from their country of service. I am exploring what they brought home and why they chose what they did.”

Denhard is one of three Wheaton College students curating art exhibitions in the Beard and Weil Galleries this academic year. The other two are Kayla Malouin ’10, who is working with Niederstadt on a show on the history of the Permanent Collection, and Carrie Peabody ’10, who will work with Professor of Art Ann Murray on an exhibition of the work of Mansfield artist Tina Beecher. Both shows will run from Sunday, March 7, 2010, through Friday, April 16, 2010.

Wheaton has been featuring student-curated exhibitions at least since the mid-1970s, noted Murray. One of the first was done by students in a seminar she team-taught. “Now that we have courses in museum studies and a collections curator to supervise students on projects in the Collection Study Room, the frequency of student-curated exhibitions is increasing rapidly,” she said.

Students who curate shows in conjunction with seminars, independent study courses, or other courses receive course credit. Other exhibitions are curated by students as part of their work-study jobs with the Permanent Collection. A third variant is for students to curate exhibitions as faculty research assistants.

“I think that the most important aspects of students curating shows are that they are able to combine their classroom learning— readings and discussion and, at times, hands-on exercises—with real world experience, even if that ‘real world’ is still on Wheaton’s campus,” said Niederstadt. “What impresses me about the students with whom I’ve worked so far is their dedication to their projects and their willingness to go the extra mile. For  example, Mollie spent hours in the Collection Study Room and in the Mars studios conducting research, designing plans and layouts, and building mounts for her show. Kayla has worked on her research into the history of the collection for three years. Carrie took an off-campus internship and used the contacts she made and the skills she gained to develop an exhibition by a local, well-known artist.”

Collecting in the Peace Corps features items from Denhard’s father as well as five other volunteers, including a large equestrian statue loaned to Wheaton’s Permanent Collection by Julian Garberson ’09 and his family. Garberson’s father, the late James Whitney “Whit” Garberson, was a Peace Corps staff member and the Acting Country Director in Burkina Faso, where he collected the statue. He also met and married Julian’s mom Linda Garberson, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso.

Denhard is hoping that the exhibition will educate viewers about the country of Burkina Faso and the Peace Corps, and get them thinking about various concepts of collecting.

Her favorite pieces in the exhibition include a leather and metal necklace and a wooden statue of a woman and small wooden buffalo, owned by her father, because of the simple but touching stories behind them.

“The necklace was a gift from a Bella woman [the Bella are a nomadic peoples] who would pass through his village every couple of months. He would give her any tin cans or scrap metal he had, and in return she once brought him a fresh gourd that contained goat’s milk. Another time she gave him this necklace, which has a 50-centime coin from 1917 as the centerpiece.”

The two wooden items have a shared history, she noted. “At the end of his service, my dad needed to leave before the rainy season began and the roads became too muddy for travel. The townspeople kept asking him to wait, but of course, eventually he had to depart. Once back in [the capital city] Ouagadougou, a soldier found him and gave him those two objects as parting gifts from the villagers of Pensa. The villagers sent them to the capital and had a soldier track down my father.”

Denhard has worked as an intern at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and has worked as a Collections Study Room Monitor for the past year. Since September 2009, she also has served as an intern in the Beard and Weil Galleries. She was in Niederstadt’s “Exhibition Design” course last year and worked on the collaborative Making it Modern exhibition, but this is her first solo experience as a curator.

“Figuring out how to create an exhibition from the ground up—everything from soliciting participants to writing labels and creating the show’s overall design—has been a challenge. With Making it Modern, there were 14 of us. With this show, it is just me,” said Denhard, who is pursuing minors in art history and French studies.

This exhibition has taught her a lot. “With this project, I’ve made a number of connections with former Peace Corps volunteers, learned how to interview participants and organize information, care for loaned objects, improve my ability to write labels and introductory text, and expand my exhibition design and installation capabilities,” she said.

“This project has certainly added to my educational experience at Wheaton, giving my museum studies courses an added dimension. Those courses now seem more practical and applicable to my future career plans, which include grad school for museum studies or public humanities. I plan to pursue a career in exhibition planning, exhibition design or collections management. And though it may now seem out of reach, I would love to travel the world helping countries and communities create exhibitions appropriately representing their cultural history.”

The flooded urban landscape. The destroyed homes and splintered lives. The rooftop pleas for rescue. The images left in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are permanently etched into the American consciousness.

Four years later, one of the five deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history is still on the radar of those trying to decipher the devastation, rebuild communities, and prevent the mistakes made in preparing for the storm and moving people out of harm’s way from happening again. On November 2 and November 3, Lynn Dupont, principal planner and GIS manager for the New Orleans Regional Planning Commission (NORPC) will share her expert knowledge of the subject at Wheaton College.

Dupont will present a lecture on Monday, November 2, reflecting on the Katrina response and recovery efforts, especially in New Orleans, one of the heaviest hit areas. The lecture will be at 7 p.m. in Hindle Auditorium in the Science Center. The event is open to the public. On Tuesday, November 3, she will visit classes and meet with student groups and other interested parties.

Katrina’s impact on New Orleans has never left the hearts and minds of students, staff and faculty members. For four years, the Office of Service, Spirituality and Social Responsibility has coordinated a January break trip in which students, faculty and staff travel to New Orleans to help recovery efforts there. Professor of Mathematics Thomas Ratliff explores the issues raised by the storm in his First Year Seminar “Water, Water Everywhere: The Legacy of the 1927 Flood of the Mississippi River and Hurricane Katrina.” Such issues are also addressed in Urban Economics, taught by Associate Professor of Economics Russell Williams, who invited Dupont to come to campus.

While on campus Dupont will meet with Ratliff and attend Associate Professor of Geology Geoffrey Collins's geology class and Assistant Professor of Political Science Marcus Allen's “Contemporary Urban Politics” class. She also is scheduled to meet with the group of students who are planning to go to New Orleans during the upcoming January break.

“The scale and extent of the devastation from the Katrina and Rita hurricanes of 2005 is beyond what most Americans realize,” said Dupont. “This presentation will give a brief geographical history of why New Orleans is where it is in terms of economic, cultural and historical background, giving the audience a basis for understanding the widespread effects of this catastrophe not only on the city, and the region, but on the country.”

Dupont is a New Orleans native who, through her position at the NORPC, was actively involved helping to coordinate  the data response and Geographic Information Systems [GIS], working with a myriad of agencies having somewhat conflicting agendas in a setting that included unbelievable numbers of generous volunteers all responding in a chaotic atmosphere.

She plans to talk about the GIS data, collaborative endeavors, recovery efforts and the changes that have occurred since the Katrina and Hurricane Rita experiences.

Williams noted that not only will Dupont be speaking from a professional perspective, but also from a personal one as well. “Lynn, herself, lost her house to Katrina—water was up to the second floor—and did not know the whereabouts of her daughter, who had been staying with friends, for a couple of days after the flood,” he said.

Dupont has worked at the NORPC since 1999, as principal planner and GIS manager, working with state and federal agencies in procuring data for use at the local level for enhancement projects, land use studies and general data integration in the region. Before joining NORPC, Dupont, who is a licensed landscape architect, worked for many years on the physical design of subdivisions and retirement communities, and on basic commercial, industrial and military site design in Virginia Beach and Charlotte. She has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of New Orleans.

In her work at the NORPC, she has received many recognitions and awards, among them: serving as past-president of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, and receiving the 2009 State of Louisiana Special Achievement Award in Remote Sensing and GIS for her work with the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

Her father, a professor of comparative religion, conducted his research in India, and the family lived among the local people. As a result, Jackson studied the culture through the eyes of a child—playing in villages with local children, bathing in buckets and sleeping on straw-stuffed mats. The experience has had a lasting impact, influencing her studies at Wheaton and her work.

Now the 2006 Wheaton graduate plans to head off to Nairobi next year, having won a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship. The $30,000 award will allow her to pursue graduate study and work to strengthen constitutional democracy in the region.

Working with women's group in Africa.

Jackson first focused on Africa's political and cultural struggles as an international relations major at Wheaton.

"During my junior year, I traveled to Durban, South Africa for a study abroad program focusing on reconciliation and development after apartheid. While there I conducted research for my honors thesis on how HIV and AIDS policy affects women in Sub-Saharan Africa. I fell in love with the country's cultural and natural beauty, and I was entranced by its complex history and politics," she said.

The Indiana native's undergraduate studies formed the foundation for her work with political and nonprofit organizations following graduation. Most recently, she served as Program Officer for the Southern and East Africa team at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Washington, D.C. Working with governments and grass roots organizations, she improved women’s political participation in Uganda, strengthened political parties in Kenya and provided leadership training to politically active youth across the east Africa region.

While at Wheaton, Jackson was engaged in several student-led initiatives, including the Student Government Association, the Wheatones, the Student Executive Board and the President's Budget Committee. She also played lacrosse, and competed at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament.

The Rotary scholarship will allow Jackson to enroll at the University of Nairobi or the United States International University in Nairobi and pursue a master’s degree in comparative politics. During her time in Nairobi, she plans to work with political parties and civil society organizations monitoring the election. Until her departure, she serves as campaign manager for former Providence city solicitor Joe Fernandez in his bid to be elected attorney general of Rhode Island.

The purpose of the Ambassadorial Scholarships program is to further international understanding and friendly relations among people of different countries. While abroad, scholars serve as ambassadors of goodwill to the people of the host country and give presentations about their homelands to Rotary clubs and other groups.

"In doing the Rotary program, I am hoping to enhance my understanding of the African political context, particularly how identity politics affects voting patterns. I am also excited to continue the work I was doing at NDI, at a higher level, in the field, directly supporting political activists making a difference in their own country. I believe strongly in the role that good systems, institutions, and governance plays in supporting sustainable development and can think of no better way to improve my ability to support the betterment of such institutions," she said.

Jackson's journey from a city in Indiana to the vast continent of Africa seemed destined from the start. "My childhood was an education in crossing boundaries and serving as an ambassador between diverse groups and people. I have fallen in love with east Africa and am excited to immerse myself in the culture and community there. I look forward to sharing my passion for the region with my Rotary supporters and providing a link between two very different worlds."

In 2009, six students from Wheaton won Fulbright Scholarships, placing the college in a five-way tie for ninth place. The schools tied with Wheaton include Bowdoin, Occidental, University of Richmond and Williams colleges. The success of the top Fulbright-producing institutions was highlighted in the October 18th edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education (registration required).

The six Wheaton graduates studying and working on Fulbrights this year are Julia Bolt '08 who is analyzing the progress being made in the area of desegregation of the public school system in Bulgaria; Scott Clark '09, who holds a teaching assistantship at a teacher-training college in Argentina and is writing as a journalist; Jose Diaz '08, who is serving as an English teaching assistant in Spain; Megan O'Sadnick '09, who joined a research team at the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) studying glaciers located on Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard; Blair Rosetti '09, who is conducting research in stem cell biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands; and Chelsey Taylor '08, who is teaching English in South Korea.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program equips future American leaders with the skills they need to thrive in an increasingly global environment by providing funding for one academic year of study, research or assistant teaching abroad.

Fellows undertake self-designed programs in disciplines ranging from the social sciences, business, communication and performing arts to physical sciences, engineering and education. It is the largest U.S. international exchange program offering opportunities for students, scholars, and professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools worldwide. About 1,500 students and 1,300 scholars from the United States and abroad are studying and working on Fulbrights this academic year.

Started in 1946, the international academic-exchange program offers grants that are awarded by binational Fulbright commissions and financed by the U.S. government and the government of each country in which the awards are available. This year the United States contributed nearly $221 million to the fellowships.

The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Financial support is provided by an annual appropriation from Congress to the Department of State, with significant contributions from participating governments and host institutions in the United States and abroad. The Presidentially appointed J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board formulates policy guidelines and makes the final selection of all grantees.

In the United States, the Institute of International Education administers and coordinates the activities relevant to the U.S. Student Program, including conducting an annual competition for the scholarships.

Lists of Fulbright recipients and information about the award are available at www.fulbrightonline.org/us.

Scary movies and Halloween go together like a disembodied hand in glove. But why do we love them so? What is it that makes us revel in being scared out of our wits, when fear is such an unpleasant emotion?

These are among the many questions being seriously examined by Professor Jason Reiss and the 18 students in his First Year Seminar, “Psychology and Horror.”

One of 28 seminar sections offered to Wheaton’s freshmen this fall, the course is intended to introduce students to college-level study through a hot topic. As the class explores the horror genre—watching and analyzing classic and contemporary horror movies—they are finding a creaky door opening to many questions about the human psyche, from the connections between sex and violence to the question of evil to the “neuroscience of zombies.”

“I want to show that you can take a fun topic and treat it as a subject for serious study,” says Reiss, who began developing the theme after searching for a late-night horror film on the Internet last spring. As a new father, he had become tired of a steady diet of G-rated fare, and found himself craving something more grown up.

"I suddenly felt, ‘I’ve just got to see some blood and gore,’” he recalls. “It was like I needed a fix.”

Being a psychologist and a student of human nature, Reiss began wondering about that.

“I started thinking about psychological drives,” he says. “I started thinking about Freud, who is all about sex and aggression—as are horror films. Are horror films fulfilling needs that we can’t work out in the real world, because they’re not allowed? That’s very Freudian.”

Or perhaps, he wondered, our obsession with horror is akin to an addiction?

“If so, how is it similar to and different from a drug addiction? I also started thinking about gender and how women are depicted in horror films. And I began to realize that this was a really rich topic.”

His students agree. “Learning about psychology through horror is very interesting,” says Karl Mader ’13. “Fear is the strongest emotion tied to memory, so it makes perfect sense to learn this way, even though the approach may be somewhat unorthodox.”

Reiss’s first question to his freshmen this fall was: What exactly is horror?

The students found the term hard to define, but they observed that horror situations commonly involve the unknown, the dark, a feeling of loss of control, a sense of being trapped, and the innocent turning evil. Fear is at the heart of it all.

Their discussion led to an exploration of fear and human emotion, including a trip to the lab for an exercise on Galvanic Skin Response, one of the physiological measures used in a polygraph (lie detector) test.

After watching two Dracula films, Nosferatu (1922) and Shadow of a Vampire (2000), the class began to discuss the ties between sex and violence in horror mythology.

Reiss notes that our cultural concept of horror has changed with time. For example, the vampire story was not always eroticized. In 1897, when Bram Stoker wrote the book Dracula, the idea of three rapacious women ravaging a man was terrifying to Victorian readers.

The horror film has also evolved through the decades. The “B” movies of the 1950s—with titles such as I Married a Monster from Outer Space and Attack of the Giant Leeches—implicitly reflected a dominant theme of the era: the dread of the “Red Menace” posed by Communism. In such films, notes Reiss, “suddenly we’re not individual people. We’re just clones, or pod people.... In some ways, we’re working out our demons through the horror film.”

Throughout the semester, the class will continue to explore psychology through such horror gems as Alien, Halloween and Night of the Living Dead. They are planning two trips to the cinema to see current films, and will also host guest lecturers. Professor Josh Stenger (English) will speak on blaxploitation in the horror film, and librarian Mason Brown will talk about the horror graphic novel.

“I picked a topic that I wanted to learn about,” says Reiss. “I’m not an expert in horror, and I’m learning along with my students. I think they know that their ideas are just as legitimate as mine. We’re just exploring the terrain.”

Perhaps they should keep an eye on what’s coming up behind them. Mwa-ha-ha-haaaa.

Russell, professor of music emeritus, taught at Wheaton for 41 years and was college organist from 1963 to 2005, at which time he and his wife Lorna Brookes Russell retired to Stockton Springs, Maine. The Russells, who served for more than 33 years as organists and choir directors at Trinity Episcopal Church in Wrentham, Mass., are still musically active as ministers of music at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Blue Hill, Maine, and in a Baroque chamber ensemble, The Somerset Consort.

Russell recently has been elected dean of the Bangor Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, and is the instructor for the Organ Education Program launched last spring by Belfast area clergy to encourage piano students to study the organ, and to assist church pianists who want further training in organ playing.

Wheaton College's pipe organ was funded by a $100,000 gift from the late Catherine Filene Shouse '18, as well as support from other donors. It is in the style of 18th-century German instruments, with mechanical ("tracker") key action, and comprises 39 stops totaling around 2,600 pipes. It was installed and dedicated in the fall of 1969.

There is no admission charge for the recital, but there will be an opportunity to contribute to the Carlton T. Russell Organ Fund. The fund was  established in 2004 by family and friends to help support periodic restoration and renovation of the organ. Cole Memorial Chapel is handicap accessible.

For directions to Wheaton College, go to www.wheatoncollege.edu/About/Driving.html. For a complete online arts calendar, go to www.wheatoncollege.edu/arts. For more information and updates call the arts information line at 508-286-3300 or email arts@wheatoncollege.edu.

The greenhouses, located at the rear of the Science Center, are open four times each academic year. Visitors are encouraged to bring a houseplant they wish to repot. Soil and pots will be available at the greenhouse.

The greenhouse staff will assist aspiring ''green thumbs'' as needed, and advise on proper plant care. Donations are accepted to cover the cost of soil and pots. In addition, a selection of plant specimens will be available for sale.

The Wheaton College greenhouses were built in the mid 1960s thanks to a grant by the Esso Education Foundation, and they comprise two houses side by side. The greenhouses are an important site for research conducted by faculty and students. Projects have included dormant seed germination from sand banks and wetlands, nutrient studies, and genetic inheritance in consecutive generations.

The greenhouses also serve to supply materials for experimentation during class laboratories. For example, students can use spines from cacti for micro-surgery, or search among the Polypodiums for prothallia and sporophytes.

Exhibition is a third function of the Wheaton greenhouses. A wide variety of plant life is maintained in a minimally controlled environment in order to allow the specimens to display their natural growth tendencies. Any needed pest control is accomplished with organic substances so as not to interfere any more than is necessary with the ecosphere. A program using predatory, beneficial insects has also been instituted.

By keeping one house warm and fairly dry, and the other more humid, it is possible to display both desert and tropical species in a spatially limited facility. A newly installed garden pool allows for the inclusion of aquatic species. Plants are arranged by family, genus, and species and labeled as such along with a code to their care that is described at the entrance to each house.

During the 1994-95 academic year, a program of community outreach was instituted. Area garden clubs are contacted and invited to tour the greenhouses as a public service. Additionally, home school students visit along with public school classes. Liaison work with other colleges and local nurseries has also increased visibility and established a working relationship beyond the Wheaton campus. A small area holds duplicate specimens for purchase by visitors.

Donations are welcome to help maintain, repair and renovate the greenhouses.

Please contact Jane Young, the greenhouse caretaker, at (508) 286-3943 or e-mail her at jyoung@wheatonma.edu to arrange for a greenhouse tour or to seek assistance for you or your organization. You can also go to www.wheatoncollege.edu/Science/greenhouse/ to find out what's blooming now.

"We patrolled the beach at night looking for leatherback sea turtles coming up to nest. We would collect their eggs and put them in a hatchery that would be protected from poachers. It was so neat to see these huge animals up close, and it really sparked my interest in marine research and the impact we are having on marine life," she said.

She will be able to indulge that interest in a big way over the next two years, thanks to a $46,500 fellowship award. Perkins has been named an U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Greater Research Opportunities Undergraduate Fellow. The fellowship is open to students in environmental fields of study. It provides up to $19,250 per year for the students’ junior and senior year and $8,000 for internship support. The internship may be fulfilled at an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) facility anywhere in the United States. Just 25 undergraduate students around the country were awarded the fellowship.

Wheaton Professor of Biology Scott Shumway applauds the committee’s choice. "I was thrilled when I heard that Ellen had received this prestigious national fellowship,” he said. “She is a highly deserving candidate with a major in environmental science and mathematics—a very strong combination. The fellowship comes at a turning point in her academic career when she needs to begin gaining research experience to complement her classroom learning. I look forward to seeing her develop as a scientist over the next two years and beyond."

Late last fall, it was Shumway who suggested that Perkins apply for the fellowship. Her stellar academic performance in science and math, combined with her broad interest in environmental science, made her an ideal candidate, he said.

Perkins didn’t know what to expect when she applied. The process began late in the fall semester, just as she was preparing for finals. "It was very complicated and came at a busy time of the school year. I am so grateful for the support I received from faculty and staff at Wheaton. I couldn’t have done it without them," she said.

Perkins also appreciates the fact that she has become very interested in “the interconnectedness” of ecology, math and environmental science because of her classes at Wheaton. “Part of the reason I am a math minor is because I enjoy math and problem solving. I also see it as a key tool to understanding and solving environmental problems. I can see the applications to the environment in all of the math classes I have taken, whether it is setting up matrices using linear algebra or using statistics.”

Working in the field, in Costa Rica

Access to field work is the most significant aspect of her academic experience here, according to Perkins. In January, she completed field research in Shumway’s "Tropical Field Biology," a faculty-led study abroad course in Costa Rica. She also took several trips to Cape Cod with Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Peter Auger’s ecology class. "Sandy Neck Beach was not only gorgeous, but also an amazing place to study the environment, as well as the impact that humans have on it."

Currently Perkins is narrowing her research possibilities and then will begin looking for a corresponding EPA facility for her internship in the summer. Although she hasn’t determined the specific focus for her research, she plans to look at the human development of coastal areas and its impact on ecological habitats, which would combine her environmental and marine biology interests.

She said she is eager to give back to the academic community by presenting her research at Wheaton College events. "Having this fellowship is a great start to doing research later on in my career, so that I would be able to go back and talk to future scientists. The results of my internship will open up the environmental science field to a whole new group of students."