Faculty, Staff & Student Achievements
ACADEMIC YEAR 2009 - 2010
August 2010
September 2010
Pictured from left to right: Andrea Eddy, 2009-10
Hope Mortar Board Webmaster; Dan Turner, National
Mortar Board President; Hope advisor Dianne Portfleet;
Kelsey Bos, 2010-11 Hope Mortar Board president;
and Phoebe Burtless-Creps, 2010-11 Hope Mortar Board
treasurer.
July 29, 2010
Mortar Board Named Tops in Nation
The Hope College Alcor Chapter of Mortar
Board has been named the nation's top chapter. The
award was presented at the organization's national
conference in Chicago.
Hope was selected from six finalists to receive
the Ruth Weimer Mount Chapter Excellence Award. Mortar
Board is the premier national honor society recognizing
college seniors for superior achievement in scholarship,
leadership and service. Membership is synonymous
with dedication and success. Only a select few students
on each campus are invited to join this esteemed
society – an honor naming them among the most
amazing college scholar-leaders in the U.S.
The Alcor chapter has existed at Hope since the
1936-37 academic year. It became part of the national
Mortar Board organization in 1961.
July 29, 2010
Susan Dunn Featured in
MSU Nursing Anniversary Calendar
 Dr.
Susan Dunn of the Hope College nursing faculty is
among the alumni of the nursing college at Michigan
State University highlighted in a calendar produced
to commemorate the program's 60th anniversary.
Dunn, who is an associate professor of nursing and
chairperson of the department at Hope, completed
her doctorate at Michigan State University in 2005.
The College of Nursing at MichiganStateUniversity
was established in 1950. Titled "A Heritage
of Distinction," the program's year-long celebration
honors the alumni and historical accomplishments
of the college and their impact on healthcare in
local communities.
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July 28, 2010
Chemist Jeff Johnson Receives
National ACS Research Grant
 Dr.
Jeff Johnson, an assistant professor of chemistry
and Towsley Research Scholar at Hope College, has
received an Undergraduate New Investigator Grant
from the American Chemical Society's Petroleum Research
Fund (ACS-PRF).
He has been awarded $50,000 for the next two years
for his project "Toward Greater Understanding
and Expanded Utility of the Palladium-Catalyzed Activation
of Carbon-Carbon Single Bonds." The ACS makes
approximately 45 of the awards nationwide each year.
The Undergraduate New Investigator grants provide
funds for scientists and engineers who are in the
beginning years of their independent careers in academia,
and are intended as seed money for generating preliminary
results that can be used in applying for further
funding from other agencies. Recipients must be in
departments without doctoral programs and must involve
undergraduate students in the work being supported.
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September 29, 2009
Hope
to Present Award to Elton Bruins
 Hope College will present a Meritorious Service Award to Dr.
Elton Bruins at a time and place eminently appropriate: during
the rededication for Graves Hall - a ceremony that celebrates
a project in which he played an important role.
The award recognizes a person's contributions to Hope and its
alumni through notable personal service and long-time involvement
with the college. Hope will present the award on Friday, Oct.
9, during the rededication ceremony, which will begin at noon
and is taking place in conjunction with the college's Homecoming
Weekend.
Dedicated in 1894, Graves Hall re-opened at the beginning of
the school year in August after a year-long, $5.7 million, adaptive
restoration that has emphasized a return to the building's original
character while updating the 19th-century landmark for use in
the 21st.
Bruins is former director of the college's A.C. Van Raalte Institute
and the Evert J. and Hattie E. Blekkink Professor Emeritus of
Religion at Hope and was involved in the restoration planning
as a scholar of the building's history. Long interested in local
and campus history, he has written about the history of Graves
Hall and was a member of the committee that guided the planning
for the restoration.
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September 29, 2009
Major
Grant Funds Arts and
Humanities Research Program
A major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is funding
a new program at Hope College designed to deepen students' scholarship
in the arts and humanities through collaborative, interdisciplinary
research projects and the use of digital technologies.
The foundation has awarded Hope $200,000 to create the "Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation Scholars Program in the Arts and Humanities." The
program, which will begin in the fall of 2010, will involve select
students in a series of new courses beginning their sophomore
year and enable them across the rest of their time at Hope to
develop research projects in areas of scholarly interest with
faculty mentors, with a particular emphasis on teaching them
how to use new and emerging digital technologies in pursuing
and sharing their work.
"The Mellon program will build upon the college's long
tradition of student-faculty collaborative scholarship by offering
a unique opportunity to students who are passionate about the
arts and humanities and want to deepen their learning," said
Dr. James Boelkins, provost at Hope. "Through coursework
and collaborative research, they will become better learners
and better writers, and will be better prepared for graduate
school or the workplace."
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September 14, 2009
Hope
Enrollment Tops 3,200
for Fourth Consecutive Year
Enrollment above 3,200 for the fourth consecutive year is helping
to keep the Hope College campus a busy place.
Hope has enrolled 3,230 students this fall, the second-highest
total in the college's history.
The enrollment follows a successful admissions year that saw
the college pass its goal of 800 new students. The total has
campus housing at capacity and sees the academic program its
busiest ever with the college's full-time-equivalent enrollment
at a record high.
The high enrollment headcount follows a record enrollment last
year of 3,238 students, a total that included the largest graduating
class in the college's history.
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September 14, 2009
R.
Richard Ray Jr. to Receive Alumni Award
 Dr. R. Richard Ray Jr., dean for the social sciences at Hope
College, has been chosen to receive the Career Achievement Award
being presented by the Kinesiology Alumni Society of the University
of Michigan.
Ray, who graduated from the university in 1979 with a major
in physical education, will receive the recognition on Friday,
Sept. 25, in conjunction with homecoming weekend at the university.
The award is presented to a kinesiology alumnus or alumna "who
has shown outstanding professional and personal achievement throughout
their career in their chosen field and/or public service in any
field." During the presentation event, held in conjunction
with an all-class reunion, the society will also be honoring
two other individuals with Early Career Achievement and Lifetime
Achievement awards. Board Chair Scott Jeffer noted, "It
was an easy selection for us and an honor to recognize Rich for
both his commitment to the fields of Athletic Training and Kinesiology.
We are particularly impressed by his commitment to his students
as well. Dr. Ray is an outstanding School of Kinesiology alumnus
and we are thrilled to present him with the 2009 Career Achievement
Award."
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September 1, 2009
Hope
Receives NSF Grant
for New Spectrometer
A major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will
help enable Hope College to continue to provide its students
access to highly sophisticated and modern equipment while expanding
its educational reach through cyberspace.
The NSF has awarded Hope $416,767 to purchase a new nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, which is a powerful tool
for studying the structures and dynamics of chemical compounds.
The new instrument, which the college plans to install during
the spring semester, succeeds a predecessor that was itself sophisticated
when it replaced another of its kind a dozen years ago - such
is the difference that advances in technology make, according
to the grant proposal's lead author.
"There have been significant changes in technology since
we purchased our current NMR 12 years ago," said Dr. Jeffrey
Johnson, who is an assistant professor of chemistry and is co-directing
the grant project with Dr. Moses Lee, dean for the natural sciences
and professor of chemistry. "The primary benefit of this
instrument to our program is that it has greater sensitivity,
which will enable it to test smaller samples and to work more
quickly. It will also have an auto-sampler, allowing us to set
up 30 or more experiments to run automatically overnight."
Multiple research groups at Hope use the college's NMR spectrometer.
It plays a role in projects ranging from monitoring of phosphates
in the bed of LakeMacatawa, to analyzing molecular structures
that aid the design and synthesis of polymers for electronic
and biomedical applications, photochromes and novel medicinal
agents. It will also enable the determination of the structure
and conformation of biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic
acids. The current instrument's benefits across the past 12 years
have included providing data for 56 peer-reviewed publications
that have included 197 undergraduate co-authors.
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More than 400 Hope students
participated in service projects in 36 different
locations throughout the Holland area through the college's "Time to Serve" program.
September 1, 2009
Hundreds
of Students to
Spend Day Volunteering
More than 400 Hope College students will participate
in service projects throughout the area through the college's "Time
to Serve" program on Saturday, Sept. 5.
Most of the students will be members of the newly arrived freshman
Class of 2013. The students signed up shortly after their arrival
at Hope, during "New Student Orientation," for the
mass volunteer effort.
The students will be working in groups of five to 20 at approximately
three dozen sites from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Projects are scheduled
throughout Holland as well as in Zeeland, and will range from
sorting and cleaning at Goodwill Industries, to cleaning and
other projects at the Critter Barn, to groundskeeping and cleaning
at many area churches.
The "Time to Serve" program is designed to help new
students learn about service while helping and getting to know
their community and becoming better acquainted with one another.
The project began in the fall of 2000 with 10 projects and about
100 participants, and had grown to 24 projects and 300 students
a year later. In October 2001, "Time to Serve" 2000
received a 2001 Distinguished Service Award from Keep Michigan
Beautiful Inc. during the group's annual conference.
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TO SERVE PHOTO GALLERY
August 26, 2009
NSF
Funds Development of
Software for Genetic Research
Hope
College has received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation
(NSF) for a project that is linking three Hope departments and three
institutions in developing computer models for genetic research.
The support will enable faculty and students in the departments of biology,
computer science and mathematics to expand an ongoing research effort
at Hope to develop software to model microbial metabolism based on information
encoded in microbial genomes. The resulting package will ultimately become
part of the RAST (Rapid Annotation using Subsystems Technology) genome
analysis service available to researchers internationally through Argonne
National Laboratory in Illinois.
The goal of the Hope project is to provide integrated, automated tools
that can assist researchers internationally to analyze the genomes, model
the way the metabolism works and provide tools for analyzing regulatory
data.
"The pace of genetic sequencing is increasingly exponentially,
and there's more data than can be analyzed manually," said Dr. Matt
DeJongh, who is an associate professor of computer science and leading
the project with Dr. Aaron Best of the biology faculty and Dr. Nathan
Tintle of the mathematics faculty. "By putting all three pieces
together, we're hoping to be able to make predictions about metabolism
and regulation in bacteria, and to do so more efficiently than would
be possible using disparate tools in different locations with different
interfaces."
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August 25, 2009
Book
Shows Service in
African Mission Work
 A new book produced by the A.C. Van Raalte Institute at HopeCollege
provides insights into the foreign-mission experience through the writings
and correspondence of long-time medical missionary Tena A. Huizenga.
The book, "Aunt Tena, Called to Serve: Journals and Letters of
Tena A. Huizenga, Missionary Nurse to Nigeria," focuses on Huizenga's
service in remote Lupwe, Nigeria, through the Christian Reformed Church
from 1937 to 1954. The volume has been published by the William B. Eerdmans
Company of Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, United Kingdom, as part
of the Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America.
"This intensely human volume guides us through 17 memorable years
of Nigerian mission history," said Eugene Rubingh, former executive
secretary of Christian Reformed World Missions. "Drawn from Tena
Huizenga's own letters, the events are sketched through the lens of joy
and tears, of small victories and unimaginable obstacles. Both candor
and love transform mundane facts into a warm and lively account of a
life poured out for God."
The book's managing editor is Dr. Jacob E. Nyenhuis, who is director
of the A.C. Van Raalte Institute and provost emeritus and professor emeritus
of classics at Hope. Serving as co-editors were Dr. Robert P. Swierenga,
who is the A.C. Van Raalte Research Professor at the Van Raalte Institute
and professor of history emeritus at Kent State University, and Lauren
M. Berka, a 2008 Hope graduate who was a student research assistant at
the institute and is now a graduate fellow in history at Arizona State
University.
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August 21, 2009
College
Guides Include
Hope Among Top Schools
 Hope College has been included in several college-guide listings in
recent months.
Hope is among the approximately 330 of "the country's best
and most interesting colleges and universities" featured in the
new 2010 edition of the "Fiske Guide to Colleges."
The annual rankings compiled by "U.S. News & World Report" have
once again included Hope College among the 100 best liberal arts colleges
in the nation. The college is 92nd out of the 249 institutions that are
considered national liberal arts colleges. In addition, Hope also continues
to be included among the institutions that the publication recognizes
for providing outstanding undergraduate research/creative projects opportunities.
The September/October 2009 issue of "Mother Jones" includes
Hope as one of "10 cool schools that will blow your mind, not your
budget," describing the college as a best value for artists with
a spiritual side.
The Princeton Review selected Hope as one of 158 institutions
it profiles in its "Best in the Midwest" section of its Web
site feature "2010 Best Colleges: Region by Region".
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August 19, 2009
Hope
a "Cool School"
According to Mother Jones
 Mother
Jones magazine (September/October 2009 issue) has included Hope College
in a listing of "cool schools that will blow your mind, not your
budget".
Hope is one of 10 schools listed as a Best Value for different reasons.
Hope is recognized as a Best Value for artists with a spiritual side.
The editor said the list was created to recognize schools that "may
not bother to juke their stats to make (the) U.S. News (and World Report)
short list, but they still have plenty to offer -- for alot less dough."
About Hope: This creative Christian college is known for its dance,
theater, art, music and visiting writers programs. Indie rocker Sufjan
Stevens is an alum."
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August 18, 2009
Poems Capture World
of High School Basketball
 Basketball
has been described by some as "poetry in motion." The world of
high school basketball is shared through poetry itself in the latest collection
by nationally-recognized poet Jack Ridl, professor emeritus of English
at Hope College.
Ridl's collection "Losing Season," being released in September
by CavanKerry Press, follows a fictional, small-town high school team
and its community in an experience lived out annually for decades across
the country. Capturing the perspective of a mix of participants - coach,
players, family, fans - and chronicling highs and lows along the way,
the individual poems together create a composite view of a year of
hope and defeat both on and off the basketball court.
Poet Conrad Hilberry has called the volume "unmatched, I believe,
anywhere in American poetry."
"I've never seen a poetry book as clearly focused as this one,
as though a smart documentary filmmaker had hung around the gym all season
filming until we can see and feel every hole and knot in the sad fabric
of that failed year," he said. "These poems are so compelling,
so varied, so familiar to anyone who has felt the impact of high school
sports that they may well introduce a new genre."
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Pictured from left to right: Andrea Eddy, 2009-10 Hope Mortar Board
Webmaster; Dan Turner, National Mortar Board President; Hope advisor
Dianne Portfleet; Kelsey Bos, 2010-11 Hope Mortar Board president;
and Phoebe Burtless-Creps, 2010-11 Hope Mortar Board treasurer.
August 30, 2010
Hope Mortar Board Chapter
Named Best in Nation
The Hope College chapter of Mortar Board received multiple
honors during the society's recent national conference, including recognition
as the top chapter in the country.
The chapter received the national Mortar Board organization's highest
honor for a collegiate chapter, the Ruth Weimer Mount Chapter Excellence
Award, during the 2010 Mortar Board National Conference, held on Friday-Sunday,
July 23-25, in Chicago, Ill. The chapter also received its fourth consecutive
Golden Torch Award, eight Project Excellence Awards, and an additional
commendation for having been the top chapter in the national "Reading
is Leading" Virtual Book Drive in both 2008 and 2009.
The Ruth Weimer Mount Chapter Excellence Award is presented to the chapter
that exemplifies the national college honor society's ideals of scholarship,
leadership and service in the most outstanding manner. The recipient
is chosen on the basis of a variety of criteria, including chapter operations,
campus visibility, member participation, advising, communications and
chapter projects.
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Hope is making a difference in its hometown
of Holland as researchers at the
college contribute to understanding of the Lake Macatawa watershed. From left
to right
are seniors Alex Behm and Morgan Willming, and area high school teachers
Jennifer Soukhome and Carl Van Faasen ’91, who visited the
Outdoor Discovery Center to collect mud samples from a pond for testing.
August 12, 2009
Watershed
Research Leads
to High School Lab Manual
Collaborative research by a team of educators studying the local watershed
has led to the publication of a lab manual that will enable high school
students to conduct explorations of their own.
 The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Press of Arlington,
Va., has published "Watershed Investigations: 12 Labs for High School
Students." The book is co-authored by Dr. Graham Peaslee of the
Hope College faculty; area teachers Jennifer Soukhome and Carl Van Faasen;
and William Statema, a recent Hope graduate now teaching in the Chicago
area.
The lab manual's exercises have been inspired by the authors' experiences
working together to understand the Macatawa Watershed, but are designed
to be used in any high school experiment-based environmental science
curriculum. The projects are designed to be open ended, with students
tasked with developing hypotheses and designing experiments to test the
problems presented. The approach is intended to teach both about issues
related to watersheds and the methodology of scientific inquiry.
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August 3, 2010
Chemist William Polik Named ACS Fellow
 Dr. William F. Polik, who is the Edward and Elizabeth Hofma Professor
of Chemistry at Hope College, has been named a 2010 ACS Fellow by the
American Chemical Society.
The ACS Fellows program recognizes members of the professional organization
for demonstrated excellence in the chemical sciences and outstanding
service to the ACS. Fellows come from the entire breadth of ACS's membership,
which exceeds 161,000 worldwide, and the chemical enterprise - including
high school teaching, entrepreneurship, government service, and all sectors
of industry and academia.
This is the second year in the ACS Fellows program. Although most of
this year's 192 fellows are educators, only three, including Polik, are
from primarily four-year liberal arts colleges. Polik was one of eight
scientists from Michigan honored, including from Hope, Central Michigan
University, the Michigan Molecular Institute, the University of Michigan
and Wayne State University
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August 17, 2010
Hope's
Reputation Praised in College Guides
Hope College continues to fare well in multiple college guides as the
newest editions of a variety of the publications debut in tandem with
the advent of the school year nationwide.
Recent or soon-forthcoming guides that list Hope among the select number
of institutions they single out for praise include the 2011 "Best
Colleges" published by "U.S. News & World Report," the
2011 "Fiske Guide to Colleges" and the "America's Best
Colleges 2010" published by "Forbes Magazine."
The annual rankings compiled by "U.S. News & World Report" have
once again included Hope College among the 100 best liberal arts colleges
in the nation.
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August 3, 2010
Reed Swift Honored as Volunteer Mentor
 Hope
College senior Reed Swift of Midland has received the July "Senator's
Award for Men in Mentoring" from State Senator Wayne Kuipers (R-Holland).
Swift is a mentor with Big Brothers/Big Sisters of the Lakeshore. He
received the award during a ceremony on Friday, July 23.
The award consists of a framed certificate signed by Kuipers and Governor
Jennifer Granholm, and a $50 gift certificate to the City Vu Bistro inside
City Flats Hotel in Holland.
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August 3, 2010
Chemist William Polik Named ACS Fellow
Dr.
William F. Polik, who is the Edward and Elizabeth Hofma Professor of
Chemistry at Hope College, has been named a 2010 ACS Fellow by the American
Chemical Society.
The ACS Fellows program recognizes members of the professional organization
for demonstrated excellence in the chemical sciences and outstanding
service to the ACS. Fellows come from the entire breadth of ACS's membership,
which exceeds 161,000 worldwide, and the chemical enterprise - including
high school teaching, entrepreneurship, government service, and all sectors
of industry and academia.
This is the second year in the ACS Fellows program. Although most of
this year's 192 fellows are educators, only three, including Polik, are
from primarily four-year liberal arts colleges. Polik was one of eight
scientists from Michigan honored, including from Hope, Central Michigan
University, the Michigan Molecular Institute, the University of Michigan
and Wayne State University
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