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August 30, 2002
Kendade
to Encourage Multidisciplinary Study
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Photo: Todd LeMieux
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Beginning this fall,
classes will be held and labs occupied in Kendade Hall, the first
phase to be completed in the College's new science center. Kendade's
bright and airy classrooms and state-of-the-art labs should quickly
become popular with the science set—and just about everyone
else on campus. And that's the idea.
Students studying
everything from electromagnetic theory to the work of Henry James
will be among the first to attend classes in the building. Those
enrolled in Genetics and Molecular Biology, taught by biological
sciences faculty Jeffrey Knight and Craig Woodard, will be among
the pioneers in the new labs. The building's atrium will serve
as a gathering place for the entire College community. Such eclectic
use of the nexus of the science center is in keeping with the
integrated design of both Kendade and the science center as a
whole, a design that evolved from the College's intention to create
a unified complex that would encourage multidisciplinary education.
"As has been
recognized by many scientists, most notably sociobiologist E.O.
Wilson in his book Consilience, mathematics and the scientific
disciplines are melding together into one broad, consistent, and
mutually reinforcing explanation of the universe and its local
occupants," says Frank DeToma, director of the science center
and Professor of Biological Sciences on the Alumnae Foundation.
"Mount Holyoke science faculty appointments, more and more,
reflect this trend. It's a rare chemist these days who is not
aware of recent developments in molecular biology, and any physicist
worth her salt knows about photosynthesis. And any good psychologist
is interested in the chemical/biological bases of behavior. Many
mathematicians and computer scientists are busily describing or
modeling physical, chemical, and biological phenomena. We have
a paleontologist in the earth and environment department who teaches
a course in the history of life on earth. The science center is
a metaphor for these developments— it is the embodiment of
an intellectual coming-together that started at the beginning
of the last century and is accelerating at a breathtaking pace.
As such, it will encourage and facilitate cross-disciplinary and
multidisciplinary 'conversations' between and among Mount Holyoke's
scientists and their students—conversations that will lead
to even more dialogue and cooperation among the scientific disciplines
at the College. With the opening of the center, MHC students will
receive their science education in a physical environment that
matches the intellectual state of the sciences."
Interdisciplinary
Integration
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Photo: Todd LeMieux
Kendade
Hall, the heart of MHC's new science center
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Upon its completion,
the new $34.5-million science center will provide 116,000 gross
square feet of new construction and renovated space. The center
will bring together, within a complex of buildings, members of
the departments of astronomy, biological sciences, chemistry,
computer science, earth and environment, mathematics and statistics,
physics, and the College's programs in biochemistry and in neuroscience
and behavior. Carr Laboratory, which is adjacent to Kendade, is
currently undergoing a complete renovation and will be ready for
occupancy by spring semester 2003. Cleveland Hall, which is also
adjacent to Kendade and contains three large lecture halls used
primarily by the sciences, is scheduled for a major renovation
next summer. And Shattuck Hall, which is adjacent to Cleveland,
is scheduled for a complete renovation, which will be completed
by next fall. The firm of Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture
and Engineering, P.C., which specializes in the design of environments
for colleges and universities with an emphasis in science and
technology and sustainable design, designed the center.
A 'Green' Center
The new science center
project was designed, and is being built, to meet high standards
for a wide variety of measures in the areas of sustainable technologies
and practices. These standards conform to Leadership in Energy
and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria for a "green building,"
as established by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC).
The USGBC is an international organization that includes wide
representation from leading construction, environmental, architectural,
financial, and manufacturing firms. The group seeks to speed adoption
of green building practices, technologies, policies, and standards.
Getting Connected
Kendade, with the
exception of some finishing touches, is now complete and offers
many state-of-the art features. Over the summer, the building
was equipped throughout with networking electronics that will
enable the community to have access, by the middle of the semester,
to the high-speed research-focused network called Internet2. Mount
Holyoke will be the first college within the Five College consortium
to have this access. With administrative and faculty support,
Michael Crowley, director of networking for Library, Information,
and Technology Services (LITS), and Cindy Legare, LITS assistant
director, won a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
that funded the College's connection to Internet2. Begun in 1996
as a project to enhance information sharing in the national research
community, Internet2 is a collaboration of research universities,
federal agencies, and communications companies. It is "a
less traveled beltway around a congested urban area," Crowley
says, and because it has restricted access (imagine private on-ramps),
it gives educational institutions uncongested pipelines for academic
material and opportunities to exploit high-performance network
capabilities, such as media integration, interactivity, and real-time
collaboration—capabilities unavailable or impractical on
slow, crowded Internet lines. MHC faculty are eager for those
opportunities.
Internet2 will give
Professor of Physics Howard Nicholson direct access to the software
applications he needs at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
It will create a distribution channel for the videos of embryonic
fish development created by Rachel Fink, associate professor of
biological sciences. It will enable Donal O'Shea, Elizabeth T.
Kennan Professor of Mathematics and dean of faculty, to use live
medical imaging with his colleagues at Yale University to test
ideas about automating colon tumor detection. It will help Thomas
Millette, associate professor of geography and director of the
Center for Environmental Literacy, download large satellite images
for his study of the effects of climate changes on coastal wetlands.
It will expand collaborations by Associate Professor of Chemistry
Sean Decatur with the University of Pennsylvania, the University
of Chicago, and Los Alamos National Laboratory by allowing him
to use real-time remote data collection and analysis. It will
give the College's video-conferencing classroom equipment a connection
to Internet2 institutions beyond its current reach.
Summer also saw the
construction of the building's five mediated classrooms, teaching
spaces that feature state-of-the-art hardware and software, that
will be up and running early in the fall semester. In these rooms,
faculty members can control with a click of a button everything
from room lights to DVD players and data projector screens. Of
special interest to chemists is room 204, an octagonal-shaped
mediated classroom that, as of next fall, will feature ten Silicon
Graphics, Inc. computers that run special molecular-visualization
software such as Spartan, Dock, Rasmol, and Chime. Physics department
personnel and equipment moved into Kendade offices and labs in
August, and the new molecular biology and genetics labs, as well
as the advanced physics and optics labs, were completed and equipped.
Eyeing Kendade:
Incorporating Scientific Imagery
Kendade Hall not only
houses state-of-the-art labs and classrooms, but is also a work
of art. The construction design team has worked with faculty members,
led by Fink, to incorporate scientific imagery into the building.
The three atrium balcony floors will have brilliantly colored
scientific imagery (a chain of touching nerve cells on the first
floor, the solar system on the second floor, and a human female
karyotype showing all forty-six chromosomes on the third floor)
carefully created with small pieces of Marmoleum, biodegradable
sheet flooring. The chromosome design is already complete. At
the suggestion of W. Donald Cotter, associate professor of chemistry,
the hexagonal floor of Kendade's entry way will be tiled with
a geometrically similar periodic table of the elements, in which
each of the elements is represented by a hexagonal granite tile.
"From the time
I first heard there would be a building, and an atrium, I felt
it was important to have scientific imagery be a part of the building,"
says Fink. "What we see every day as scientists is so visually
stunning that I wanted to relay it," notes the biologist,
who feels that the beauty of the "worlds" she sees through
her microscope rivals almost anything that can be seen with the
naked eye. The visually oriented professor, who is at the forefront
of video microscopy (making time-lapse movies with a video camera
attached to a microscope), has used moviemaking to help students
better understand cellular processes.
Also in the works,
to be completed over the next several years, is an astrophysical
noondial being masterminded by astronomy professor Tom Dennis,
who has been working on the project with Mark Gerchman, chief
optical designer for Cooke Optics Ltd., through whose lenses a
number of acclaimed Hollywood movies have been filmed. Through
the Twelve College Exchange Program, Gerchman attended the College
in 1976 and studied with Dennis, while a student at Trinity College.
His daughter, Elizabeth "Liddy" Gerchman, graduated
from Mount Holyoke in the spring. A large lens, designed by Gerchman,
will be installed in an opening at the top of the south-facing
wall of the atrium; for about an hour around noon on each sunny
day, it will project an image of the sun onto the atrium floor,
with sufficient clarity that the ever-changing pattern of sunspots
can be followed. At noon (EST) each day, this moving solar image
will cross a 100-foot-long analemma (the familiar figure-eight
pattern often seen on globes and maps) marked out on the floor.
"Ultimately, it is hoped that the local meridian will also
be marked with sunlight, in this case a 100-foot spectrum, hopefully
with sufficient clarity that the Fraunhofer lines, indicative
of the chemical composition of the sun's atmosphere, can be seen,"
says Dennis. "There is a rich history of such calendars being
used throughout the ages; in particular, many European churches
during the 1500s installed an opening in a south-facing wall and
a meridian mark in the floor of the nave, so that a shaft of sunlight
would be seen crossing the meridian each day at local apparent
noon. This arrangement allowed accurate observations of the dates
of the solstices and demonstrated that the dates of the major
religious holidays were no longer in sync with the seasons. The
Kendade analemma adds to this theme of time and calendar the more
modern scientific ideas of the sun as a complex and dynamic physical
object, and of the quantum mechanical structure of matter. It
should be aesthetically, culturally, and scientifically compelling."
The Science of Raising $34.5 Million
Raising funds to create
and improve campus science facilities is one of the goals of The
Campaign for Mount Holyoke College, a fundraising initiative publicly
launched by the
College in October 1998. In January 2002, it was announced that
the campaign had surpassed its $200-million goal two years ahead
of schedule; two months later, the College's board of trustees
voted to expand the campaign goal to $250 million. The largest
gift ever received by the College was made in support of the new
science center. An anonymous alumna made a pledge of $10 million,
funding Kendade Hall. In addition, Marion Craig Potter '49 pledged
$5.5 million, also supporting the construction of the new science
center and representing the second largest single gift in the
history of the College. In addition to the science center, the
campaign has funded the construction and renovation of music and
art facilities, helped to increase endowment, increased
levels of giving to the Alumnae Fund/Annual Funds in support of
annual and day-to-day operations, and supported the launch of
innovative program initiatives.
The
counter is
3,483
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