Welcome Back! to our faculty returning from sabbatical/leave of absence:

Miguel Abrahantes, Engineering, did research in the area of robotics; continued working with the tetrahedral structure. He spent his sabbatical researching and beginning the process of using his in-house design prototype as a testbed for the control of multi-agent systems. In pursuing this goal he also worked to organize a broad list of research problems and a variety of techniques in the control architectures for both single-agent and multiple-agent systems that can be engaged in collaboration with undergraduate research students. Miguel spent most of the time reading and writing and did some of the reading on the Florida coast where he spent time with his family. He wrote and presented a conference paper and prepared another research paper for a journal submission. He also worked in the preparation of grant proposals that have been submitted to NSF and NASA.  

Barry Bandstra, Religion, enjoyed his sabbatical immensely even though it did not include even one motorcycle adventure. Rather, he devoted his leave to two professional pursuits, Biblical Hebrew linguistics and web technology. He flew to South Africa to present two papers at the University of Stellenbosch, one on Hebrew discourse analysis and the other on biblical prophecy. And he consulted with his longtime friend and fellow Hebraist Christo van der Merwe on new developments in cognitive linguistics. All in all Barry made significant progress on his monograph cum website entitled "Texture: a Systemic Functional Introduction to Biblical Hebrew". And pursuing his delusional fantasy of becoming a web developer, he channeled his inner Mark Zuckerberg for three days while he attended a Ruby on Rails training course in Denver. This enabled him to complete his GLCA New Directions Initiative project entitled "Fish on Rails", which is a database-driven web site for collecting data in the Outdoor Discovery Center Macatawa Greenway nature reserve in Holland. Lastly, rekindling his appreciation for the reformation tradition, he traveled to the Czech Republic and eastern Germany, and in particular Wittenberg, where Martin Luther, a formidable Hebraist among other things, pursued his teaching and reforming.

Rachel Bishop, Library, spent her sabbatical surveying local area high school seniors to better understand entering student research competencies for the development of future information literacy goals. During the spring semester, Rachel researched, developed, and implanted an online based survey that captured a snapshot of high school student’s research abilities as well as their attitudes and expectations towards libraries and the research process. Rachel also spent time interviewing both the high school students and their teachers in separate groups in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of student expectations of college level research work. Her work has provided a great deal of insight and many related discussions at the library. In addition, Rachel was able to completely focus on her physical and emotional healing after she received a terminal birth defect diagnosis and subsequent life-saving open heart surgery, which was performed on July 15, 2011. She has been fortunate enough to continue her regular 20 mile per week running routine, feeling no different than she did before her surgery, except for the profound gratitude she has every single day for her life. Rachel would again like to express her heartfelt appreciation to the outstanding members of the Hope College community for all the prayers and thoughts she has received this past year.

Annie Dandavati, Political Science, spent her semester long sabbatical in Egypt where she lived for five and a half months as Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo. It was quite literally a historical time to be there and she engaged in an analysis of transitional politics in Egypt. In order to be affiliated with the University and make critical connections with revolutionary leaders, members of civil society, the government and the women’s movement, she also taught, mentored and advised Egyptian graduate students from the Schools of Global, Refugee and Gender Studies at the American University in Cairo. As part of her work she attended lectures, participated in research colloquia and engaged in academic discussions related to gender and electoral politics in Egypt. She would be absolutely delighted to talk about the details of this work with anybody who is even tangentially interested and cares to hear about it! Additionally she was able to attend some exciting conferences and establish professional connections related to work in various locations outside of Cairo in Oman, Jordan and Israel. Despite being on sabbatical Dr. Dandavati continued to serve on Hope’s Presidential Search Committee. As the search in Holland and her research in Egypt progressed she was anxious to see who would have a new President first – Egypt or Hope College! Egypt’s President took his oath of office on June 30, 2012 and she is optimistic that Hope College is not too far behind.

Paul DeYoung, Physics, spent the 2011-2012 academic year in-residence and successfully completed the three proposed goals. The largest effort involved the development of a distance –learning algebra-based introductory physics course (PHYS105). This involved teaching the course in the fall in order to capture electronically all the projected in-class material and to capture video of Dr. DeYoung’s actually lecturing. All this material (video, audio, and screen capture) was edited and merged during the spring term. The 128 resulting lessons were combined with lesson review questions and homework (CAPA based) within Moodle. The course was offered during the summer of 2012 with an enrollment of 10. The accompanying laboratory was developed previously with Jennifer Hampton. Secondly, during this period, the design and implementation of the FPGA trigger logic programs for MoNA/LISA (the large neutron detectors at the NSCL) were ported to new design tools and updated. Lastly, Dr. DeYoung continued to serve as chairperson of the Physics Department during this time.

Greg Fraley, Biology, spent his sabbatical completing research projects that involve research funded by the Campbell Foundation and GLCA New Directions Initiative to study putative treatments for Parkinson’s disease. This project generated one 2012 publication and fostered a new collaboration with Dean Moses Lee. Greg also completed international collaborations in conjunction with the poultry industry. One project that included scientists from Australia, Spain, Japan, Germany, and Italy investigated a newly discovered neurohormone that is considered to be a molecular switch between feeding and reproductive systems. Another project involved collaborators from University of Arkansas, the USDA, Australia, Austria and Scotland. This project investigated the effects of different wavelengths of light on deep brain photoreceptors that regulate feeding and reproductive systems. Along with the other projects in his lab, these projects produced 6 manuscripts that have been submitted for publication. Five of these manuscripts have been accepted for publication and one is still under review. Two further manuscripts are currently being written. Despite being on sabbatical, Dr. Fraley also maintained his relationship with Hope students. He and Dr. Susan Fraley took 6 students to the American Pre veterinary Medical Association (APVMA) annual symposium held at NC State this year. During this meeting, Dr. Fraley was elected to the National Advisory Board for the APVMA. He is one of 3 standing members and the only member who has ever been elected from a 4-year college. He also continued his teaching of the Hope Martial Arts class along with Drs. Bekmetjev and Evans. This past spring, they promoted the largest number of students to date—21 students including Hope students, faculty, staff and children of the Hope family. Greg earned his 4th Dan (4th degree black-belt) in tae kwon do, which now places him in the Master black belt range. The Fraleys made major progress on remodeling their 160-year-old farm house and doubled the number of their cows with the births of Buttercup and Saphira .

Jason Gillmore, Chemistry, spent the 2011-12 academic year as a Visiting Research Professor in the laboratory of Regents' Professor Devens Gust at Arizona State University, where he worked with a postdoctoral fellow and a graduate student in the Gust group to help them revitalize a molecular logic project by designing a modular system to allow the tethering of quenchable fluorophores to a new reverse photochromic merocyanine-photospirooxazine. Jason also availed himself of both instrumentation and research staff in the Gust group to make a more thorough steady-state and femtosecond time resolved spectroscopy study of his own perimidinespirohexadienone photochromes than would be possible at Hope College, and initiated a computational chemistry collaboration with a NSF Graduate Research Fellow with a joint appointment in the Gust and Mujica groups at ASU. All told, this work is ultimately expected to yield two new papers while contributing results to a third paper already in progress. Meanwhile, led by Jodi's example, the Gillmore family fully integrated themselves into a wonderful church family and group of friends, learned to thoroughly appreciate life in the desert, and took wonderful trips to Sedona, Williams, Tucson, the Grand Canyon, San Diego, Sea World, and the Happiest Place on Earth! Son Will had his first birthday on sabbatical, learning to walk (and run, climb, jump…) soon after he arrived in the desert; daughter Anna celebrated her fourth birthday and thoroughly enjoyed her first year of preschool in Arizona. In June, the Gillmore family returned to Michigan where they are slowly reacclimating to life in Holland and to Michigan humidity (but rejoicing in a return to two-digit temperatures). Back at Hope, Jason completed and submitted two additional manuscripts on prior work done at Hope College with a total of 8 undergraduate and 2 high school student coauthors. The first of these has already been accepted by the Journal of Organic Chemistry, and the second was just submitted there. The latter was written largely by Ben Pollock, a two-year college transfer student whom jason has mentored in research over the past three summers and intervening school years (including remotely during sabbatical, with the help of colleague Elizabeth Sanford.) Throughout his sabbatical Jason also made three conference trips and gave several seminars, presenting on his photochemical research, the Peer-Led Team Learning pedagogy, and continued efforts in preparing graduate and postdoctoral students for faculty careers at undergraduate institutions.

Teresa Housel, Communication, spent her year-long sabbatical in Holland, New Zealand, and Australia. This past fall in Holland, she made progress writing two papers that focus on online citizen news outlets. She also continued research on other media and cultural studies projects. Before leaving Michigan, she visited her alma mater (Oberlin College) to speak about her research on first-generation students as part of a panel with other faculty and administrators for Oberlin’s First in the Family Speakers Series, sponsored by Oberlin’s Student Support Services. Dr. Housel spent this spring and early summer at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, where she was a visiting scholar in the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing. She guest-taught M.A. classes in journalism and presented a lecture to the Massey faculty about her research on the alternative and mainstream American media’s coverage of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. While in that part of the world, she visited Australia three times. In May, she delivered an invited lecture about her research on media representations of Australian nationalism and race as part of Murdoch University’s Communication & Media Studies Seminar Series (Perth, Australia). Outside of her research, Dr. Housel enjoyed her favorite foods from Australia and New Zealand once again, visited a peace garden in Queenstown, NZ, and completed hikes and runs around this beautiful part of the world.

Anne Larsen, French, made progress on two books. The first is on the life, intellectual context and reception of Anna Maria van Schurman, a seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age linguist and scholar. The second is a critical edition and translation of Van Schurman’s manuscript Latin and French letters to her mentor, which she is co-editing with Steve Maiullo and which is to be published by the Toronto Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, in the series ‘The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.’ Highlights of her sabbatical include a research trip to the Netherlands (Utrecht, Leiden, Franeker, Leeuwarden, and Amsterdam) and Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the libraries of the Mazarine, Arsenal, and Sainte Geneviève), as well as travel to university and public libraries in New York and Chicago, with side visits to museums, colleagues, and family members both here and in Europe. Additionally, she organized and chaired panels at the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America, attended two specialized conferences on early modern women, vetted a book manuscript for a press, refereed articles, wrote a couple of book reviews, and prepared a paper for a fall conference.

Don Luidens, Sociology, spent his sabbatical working on a number of projects, including an on-going seminar on writing his spiritual autobiography, traveling to the Middle East and south India on a GLCA New Directions Grant, and beginning a monograph based on his parents' twenty years of correspondence while they were Reformed Church missionaries in Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon.  These letters, from the fall of 1944 through the spring of 1964 cover a period of tremendous change in the former colonies of Britain and France, and they attest to the ripple of effects which washed over the mission community.  All of these projects have been new departures for Don, and he has found each personally enriching and intellectually stimulating.  Sabbaticals are wonderful!

Jack Mulder, Philosophy, saw his son take his first steps this past semester and did some scholarly stuff, too.  Specifically, he went to a Midwest Faculty Seminar on “Death and the Politics of Life,” and a conference on the “Virtue of Justice.”  He wrote three shorter papers on Catholicism, reproductive rights, and sexual ethics.  He also now has two longer papers under review concerning the metaphysics of free will and the proper analysis of sex and sexual ethics.  Finally, he drafted about four chapters for his book project on what you might call a philosophy of Catholicism.   

Sonja Trent-Brown, Psychology, spent her sabbatical primarily developing two book projects. The first, Faculty and Staff Diversification in Higher Education: A Compendium is a resource guide designed to support the efforts of institutions undertaking inclusion and equity initiatives. The compendium represents a synthesis of empirical evidence and best practices resources, providing an informed discussion of the issues and opportunities surrounding diversification of faculty and staff in higher education. She worked on this project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a collaborator (who also happens to be her father) and wrote a successful GLCA grant to support its completion. Her second project is a series of children’s books designed to promote phonological development and provide information for parents in helping children with developing language skills. She conducted research on phonemic awareness and development, explored existing resources utilized by speech/language pathologists, developed the characters and framework for the series’ foundation and began the writing process. Additionally, Sonja made progress on two longitudinal community evaluation projects, prepared and delivered four research presentations at professional conferences and worked on three manuscripts for publication.

Gloria Tseng, History, drafted chapters for her book, The Search for a Chinese Church: Protestantism in Twentieth-century China. The work traces various strains of development of Protestant Christianity in China from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Communist era. It analyzes the processes by which Christianity shed its initial association with Western culture, overcame the burden of Western imperialism in the midst of war and revolution, and became a faith now embraced by increasing numbers of Chinese. Highlights of her sabbatical include two lectures at Chinese universities (Shanghai University and Shanghai Normal University), two conference presentations in the UK (at the Liverpool-Hope University and the University of Edinburgh), and sightseeing excursions around the cities of Shanghai and Paris with one of her fall courses in mind (Paris and Shanghai: A Tale of Two Cities). She also had the privilege of witnessing the conversion of an uncle in Taiwan shortly before his death from cancer and helping her mother move from California and settle into a new phase of life in Holland.

Roger Veldman, Engineering, spent his spring semester sabbatical continuing research in the area of blast-loaded structures. He made significant progress in developing computer simulations of explosive detonations and subsequent blast wave propagation. These numerical method models the high explosive material, surrounding air, and a solid structure individually and then allows interaction via a coupled fluid-structure interaction technique. During his sabbatical, Dr. Veldman also worked with his colleagues from the Department of Homeland Security and Battelle Institute to present a conference paper “Impulse Plug Measurements of Blast Reflected Impulse at Close Range”, and to prepare two manuscripts for journal submission. Roger also worked with his colleagues to design a new test method and test fixtures for a series of explosive tests planned for the Aberdeen Test Center in Maryland in the Fall of 2012. 

Daniel Woolsey, Spanish, spent most of his sabbatical finishing up a first-year college Spanish textbook/curriculum project in collaboration with Lee Forester and other colleagues in the DMCL. The sabbatical also allowed Daniel the opportunity to redirect his research efforts from the intricacies of the use of the two copula verbs in Spanish to classroom second language acquisition in the Spanish immersion program at Zeeland Christian. In addition, Daniel continued to serve on departmental committees for two job searches as well as a departmental self-study, and transitioned his Spanish linguistics course to an online format, which he taught during July term. On a personal level, Daniel and his family moved across town on Christmas Eve – moving into a suspect neighborhood with the likes of the VanderStoeps and Putzkes – and lived two distinctly unique educational experiences with his six- and seven-year-old: a trip to Washington, D.C. and a trip to Disney World.