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Upcoming Events
March 27
Emeritus Distinguished Faculty & Service Awards
March 20
Lunch Colloquium March 20 WEBCAST - LC
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Contact Other Members
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find out about a travel destination or find other EUEC members who would like to travel with you, send an email to:
Find other members to get together for shared interests, whether it is forming a book club or a photography club, or getting together to take a hike. Send email to the following link to contact member who would like the same activity!
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes,
Gray
Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
We have had a busy two weeks at the Luce Center, and have some more important events coming up. We had five more of our members trained to be retirement mentors. Many thanks to them and the rest of you who have been trained. Retirement mentoring is a valuable service we can offer our faculty colleagues. The opening reception for the exhibition of EUEC art at the Schwartz Center was a great time to see the art and meet the artists. If you weren't able to attend, you can read about it below and see the booklet of all of the submitted art, which was prepared by Dianne. Finally, we had another wonderful Lunch Colloquium presented by one of my Biology colleagues, Jaap de Roode. One of our members who watched via webcast commented "Today's webinar was terrific! It reminded me why I chose to be abiologist." If you missed it, you can see the recording with the link provided below.
We have two significant events coming up. The first is our next Lunch Colloquium by Laura Otis. Laura may well be the first speaker we have had who is a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant" and is almost surely the first Professor of English speaking to us who has a B.S. and M.A. in science and spent eight years working in science labs before receiving a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature! The second event is our annual awards and new members reception. This is always a special time and I hope you will be able to come.
Finally, the OLLI spring courses are now available for registration, and it is great to have seven of our members teaching at OLLI. I hope some more of you will consider contributing to Emory and the Atlanta community in that way.
I am very grateful to John Bugge, Herb Benario, and Gretchen Schulz for help with proofing and editing.
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Lunch Colloquium March 20
 Representing Emotions that Are Hard to LoveThe Luce Center
11:00-12:30
Room 130
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Lunch Colloquium March 6
As Smart as They Are Beautiful? The Use of Medicinal Plants by Monarch Butterflies
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EUEC Awards and New Members Reception March 27
On March 27 we will celebrate the winners of our annual EUEC Faculty Distinction and Service awards and the winner of the Heilbrun Fellowship and welcome new members.
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Arts Exhibition in the Schwartz Center
 We celebrated the opening of the exhibition of EUEC art in the Schwartz Center on Sunday, March 5, with a gala reception.
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Faculty Activities
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Our third round of training for retirement mentoring took place on February 27, with five additional EUEC members being trained as mentors. Thanks so much to the trainers: Marilyn Lineberger, Paula Gomes, and our own Helen O'Shea. Our new retirement mentors are John Boli, Marilynne McKay, Al Padwa, Stewart Roberts, and June Scott.
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Helen O'Shea, Paula Gomes, Stewart Roberts, Al Padwa, Marilynne McKay, John Boli, and Marilyn Lineberger. (June Scott had to leave a few minutes early for a class.)
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OLLI courses for the spring have been announced. You can get more information about OLLI and register for courses at olli.emory.edu. You can see the complete catalog of courses by clicking here. The spring term is April 3 to May 25 and registration is now open. EUEC members John Bugge, George deMan, David Goldsmith, Stephen Margolis, Clark Poling, and Philip Tonne are teaching in this term, and Shia Elson is leading an inter-session discussion group that began on March 9. Thanks to all of these members for providing a great opportunity for the Atlanta community to learn! According to our records, this is the first time that Philip and Shia are teaching; OLLI is in great need of additional teachers and our membership comprises one of the most talented and experienced pool of candidates. If you would like more information about teaching at OLLI, please contact John Bugge or Dorothy Fletcher, members of our Teaching and Mentoring Committee.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium March 20
Representing Emotions that Are Hard to Love
Laura Otis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of EnglishIn human emotions, physiology and culture meet. Rather than debating whether biology or culture predominates in shaping human emotions, this presentation will analyze the ways that they combine in metaphors for some unpopular emotions: self-pity, resentment, spite, repressed anger, grudge-bearing, and personal hate. Emotions are notoriously difficult to describe in words, and the creative metaphors that writers and ordinary people have devised to express them reflect both their bodily experiences and the social and political forces nudging them toward some feelings and away from others. In developing her thesis, Otis will pull material from literary works (both classic and popular) and scientific studies. Few can be as well equipped to deal with so interdisciplinary a topic as she, who followed up a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and an M.A. in Neuroscience with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Otis has been collaborating on this and similarly innovative work with faculty from many disciplines ever since she came to Emory. For her creative approach to scholarship, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000.
About Laura Otis
Laura Otis began her career as a scientist, earning her B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale in 1983 and her M.A. in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco in 1988. Before receiving her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 1991, she worked in labs for eight years. Since 1986, she has been studying and teaching about the ways that scientific and literary thinking coincide and foster each other's growth. Otis works with British Victorian, Spanish, German, French, and North and South American literature, especially nineteenth-century novels. She is particularly interested in memory, identity formation, and communication technologies and has been a frequent guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In addition to her academic books, Otis has written five yet-to-be-published novels. In 2000, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship for creativity.
You can read an article in Emory News about Laura and her work by clicking here.
You can read about her latest book, Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists, by clicking here. Click here to return to top
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EUEC Awards and New Members Reception March 27
Many thanks to our Award and Honors Committee for their work in determining the winners of this year's Distinguished Faculty Awards and Distinguished Service Award. The Committee is chaired by Helen O'Shea, with members Pat Douglass, Donna Brogan, James Keller, and James Roark. On March 27 we will be honoring the following recipients:
EUEC Distinguished Faculty Awards - Sidney L. Kasfir, Professor of Art History, Emerita
- Stephen Nowicki, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology, Emeritus
- Russell E. Richey, Dean Emeritus, William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Church History, Emeritus
- W. Ronald Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English, Emeritus
EUEC Distinguished Service Award - Marianne Scharbo-DeHaan, Professor of Nursing, Emerita
Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellowship - W. Ronald Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English, Emeritus
The Awards Ceremony honoring these people and our new members will be on March 27, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., at 6 Executive Park Drive (the location of OLLI). I hope you will be able to come and celebrate with us.
In order that we know how many are planning to come and will have enough food, we ask that everyone planning to attend the ceremony please register by clicking here.
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EUEC Artists Exhibition and March 5 Reception
 We had a great reception on Sunday, March 5, to celebrate the opening of the EUEC Art Exhibition at the Schwartz Center. Everyone seemed to enjoy looking at the art and talking with the artists. Many thanks to our EUEC Committee consisting of Katherine Mitchell, Pat Miller, David Goldsmith, Judy Rohrer, and Clark Poling. They have put in enormous effort in selecting pieces to be displayed and working with Greg Catellier in the Schwartz Center to get them located and mounted for the exhibition. We are certainly very grateful to the Emory College Center for Creativity and the Arts for helping to sponsor this exhibition; particular thanks go to Leslie Taylor, Candy Tate, and Rachael Walters Brightwell. We are also very grateful to Don O'Shea who has designed the poster for this year's exhibition. Holding everything together, as always, was Dianne Becht! The committee made several awards: a first place award to Subha Thrivikraman, a second place award to Don Stein, and two honorable mention awards to Denise Raynor and Al Padwa, who brought in two small sculptures to be placed on a table.
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Katherine Mitchell, Don O'Shea, Al Padwa, Denise Raynor, Subha Thrivikraman, Woody Hickcox, Gail King, and Don Stein
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Lunch Colloquium March 6
As Smart as They Are Beautiful?
The Use of Medicinal Plants by Monarch Butterflies
Jaap de Roode, Associate Professor, Department of Biology
On March 6, 2017 Jaap de Roode of the Department of Biology gave a fascinating presentation at the Emeritus College Lunch Colloquium, titled "As smart as they are beautiful? The use of medicinal plants by monarch butterflies."
De Roode described his ongoing research into the lifecycle of monarchs, their long migrations, and their attempts to control parasites by eating poisonous milkweed. The parasites (ophryocysts, related to toxoplasma) cause the monarchs to mate less successfully, produce fewer offspring, and die prematurely. The pretty orange color of the butterflies derives from chemicals in the milkweed and advertises toxicity to deter predators. De Roode showed a memorable slide of a blue jay vomiting after eating a monarch. Monarchs will select swamp or tropical milkweed, two of hundreds of species. The females lay hundreds of eggs onto the leaves, one by one. The offspring are infected during development, but the toxin in the milkweed reduces the number and virulence of the parasites. Researchers and citizen scientists can detect the parasites by pressing adhesive tape on the wing scales of the monarchs and examining it under a microscope. The citizen scientists have also helped plot the migration courses by placing little adhesive round stickers on butterfly wings. De Roode and coworkers in his lab have discovered that, given a choice, monarchs will lay their eggs on the species of milkweed whose ingestion is most likely to discourage, weaken, and kill their parasites. Such medicinal use of plant chemicals (cardenolide in milkweed) has parallels in human medicine and animal medicine. Apes and elephants have been observed to chew certain plants for gastrointestinal distress, and African healers use herbs. Very strong drugs will kill the parasites, but may kill the host, too. This is good for preventing epidemics, but not good for the host or the parasites, since they are also killed. Very virulent parasites have the same effect, killing the host and as a consequence also themselves. Moderate infections can be controlled with chemicals (drugs, poisons), but they may also cause some parasites to survive, and these will be the strongest, most deadly ones. In human medicine this is a rising current problem, due to overuse of antibiotics, producing infectious agents that have become resistant to all antibiotics and therefore are fatal to the host. But these dangerous microorganisms can be spread by contact with others, usually in hospitals. De Roode showed slides delineating the amazing migrations of these seemingly fragile little butterflies. There are several lines of migration from the U.S. East coast, and also some from the West coast. The little animals fly thousands of miles to a certain area in Mexico year after year. They have to cross deserts, mountains, large bodies of water, and fields. How do they know where to go? This is not fully understood yet, just as bird migrations are still under study. They do seem to use a compass, since they can recognize polarized light. They may also have a magnetic sense. There are also monarchs living on other continents, now being studied, such as in New Zealand, but these do not migrate. The migrating monarchs in North America, all of one generation, arrive in Mexico in November and cluster in certain trees. In February and March they mate. Then they, and later their offspring, through multiple generations, fly back north. How do the young know where to go, when they have never been there? We don't know. Yet. The audience in the packed room had many, many questions. De Roode was asked why he studies monarchs. He answered that it is not because of their beauty, but because they get sick. But he also said that the beauty of monarchs, which makes them easily recognized, makes them good ambassadors for people studying and protecting nature. --Bee Nahmias Click here to see the de Roode lab webpageClick here to return to top
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Faculty Activities
Sidney Perkowitz
Candler Professor of Physics, Emeritus
Sidney was quoted in the Bloomberg Quint story about the movie Hidden Figures. Donna J. Brogan Professor Emerita of Biostatistics The next Donna J. Brogan Lecture in Biostatistics will be given on April 10 in the Claudia Nance Rollins Building by Marie Davidian on "The Right Treatment for the Right Patient (at the Right Time): Precision Medicine Through Treatment Regimes and SMARTs." The public is invited. Full details may be found by clicking here. Click here to return to top
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Walking the campus with Dianne
Did you figure out where we were in the last issue? I received some guesses, but very few recognized the new section of the Atwood Chemistry Building. It is a beautiful addition and has numerous features that are breathtaking. Not only are the curves of the architecture stunning, but artwork, little study nooks, and even the lecture halls are wonderful. I've supplied an additional photo below of one of the lecture rooms -- check out those chairs: they feel like leather and are very comfortable. I wonder how many students fall asleep in those comfy chairs?!
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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