Faculty Profile: Leah Chase-Wallar
Assistant Professor of Biology
and Chemistry
Dr. Leah Chase is the architect of Hope’s fledgling, formalized
neuroscience program, and in May of 2007 watched with pride as
her first neuroscience students graduated. She values being a part
of her students’ journey. “It’s
really exciting to me to see these kids graduate, to watch where
they end up,” she says.
“It’s fun to watch students mature, to watch them develop
confidence and security in themselves.”
After mentoring 31 students since the formation of the neuroscience
program,
Dr. Chase has become good friends with
many of them. She’s been invited to
many weddings over the past few years,
and has treasured letters and emails from
past students. “They’ve meant a lot to
you, and it feels good that you’ve meant
a lot to them,” she says. “They make me
think about what my daughter and son are
going to be like at this age.”
Dr. Chase values Hope because, she
says, “it is really focused not only on
doing excellent undergraduate education
in the sciences but doing research as well.
Hope does undergraduate research right.
Students have exceptional opportunity to
become involved and to do meaningful
research to bring new information to the
field.” Students in the sciences have the
opportunity, not only to do research, but
to author articles for scientific journals, to
attend conferences, and to gain exposure
to graduate-level research. Dr. Chase enjoys
guiding students through the research
projects and their Hope College experiences.
Dr. Chase loves the neuroscience program because it’s an
excellent example of
an interdisciplinary field, incorporating mathematics, physics,
psychology, biology,
and chemistry. “By the integration of all of that knowledge,
we are able to
gain a new knowledge that we wouldn’t understand if we couldn’t
integrate those
things together,” she says. “Neuroscience is such a
part of our daily lives. We
wonder about how we think, about Alzheimer’s disease, about
sleep
disorders—neuroscience is a way to understand what all these
mean.”
Dr. Chase especially appreciates Hope’s liberal arts emphasis. “Students
get to
explore a lot of issues related to their lives. It’s about
learning tools to make life
more enjoyable, and to understand the interplay of art, history,
faith, and the
sciences,” she says. “It’s easy to get tunnel-vision
in college, but I think that
Hope being a small liberal arts college makes students step back
and say, ‘Where
does my faith fit in with all this?’ and engage in critical
thinking. You’ll never
have more time to explore these things than in college, and Hope
provides a
great atmosphere to ask these questions.” This
profile was written by Megan E. Dougherty, a 2007 Hope College
graduate from Normal,
Ill., for the 2007-08 Hope College
Catalog.
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