ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ has announced five faculty promotions, including tenure awards, effective for the 2020–21 academic year.

Promoted from assistant to associate professor with tenure are Brett Huggett of the Department of Biology and Geneviève Robert of the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences.

Promoted from associate to full professor are Meredith Greer of the Department of Mathematics, TherĂ­ Pickens of the Department of English, and Sonja Pieck of the Program in Environmental Studies.

The promotions were recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College Board of Trustees.

“The words shared by each of these five superb scholars tell a collectively compelling story — of full and intense engagement with the world, with their students, and with the life of the mind, all underscored by great devotion to our college community,” says Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “The cycle of their creativity — teaching energized by scholarship, and scholarship energized by teaching — is displayed in their myriad contributions to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.”

Meet the five newly promoted faculty members, and learn a bit about what being a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor means to them.

Associate Professor of Biology Brett Huggett

Appointment year: 2014
Doctoral institution: Harvard University
Fields of research: Physiological and morphological adaptations and/or responses among tree species to stress, plant physiology, plant water relations, carbon allocation, xylem structure and function.

What it means to me to be a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor:

From my early years as a jazz musician, to a naturalist for Massachusetts Audubon Society, and now as a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor, I have always found immense joy in teaching and inspiring curiosity in others.

In the community of faculty, staff, and students at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, I have found an incredible place to incorporate my passion for plant biology into teaching and research. Working closely with the talented students at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ — in the classroom, lab, and field — I am continually inspired to innovate my teaching and to pursue new questions in biology. The natural surroundings of ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ have allowed me to center many of my courses in field-based learning. When not in the classroom or lab, you will find me out and about in the beautiful woods of Maine.

Associate Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences Geneviève Robert

Appointment year: 2014
Doctoral institution: University of Missouri
Fields of research: Rheology, viscosity, silicate melts, experimental petrology, volcanology.

What it means to me be a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor:

It’s about empowering students to view themselves as scientists. It’s about learning from my colleagues. And it’s about working towards a common goal.

I love that students come to class with an open mind, ready for a challenge. Working with ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students in the classroom and the lab has made me a better teacher and mentor, and I am constantly challenged, surprised, and impressed by them. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students have helped me build my experimental petrology research program every step of the way. Together, we’ve assembled and calibrated specialized instruments. We’ve synthesized lava at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ve measured how fast lava can flow and have co-authored papers. I could not do what I do without ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students, and I feel lucky to be a part of their journey.

I’m lucky to work alongside and learn from brilliant colleagues —in my own academic unit, through research collaborations, and in every single committee I’ve been a member of. There is such a strong culture of support, of sharing resources and expertise, and of community at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝. And what I’ve learned from day one is that staff make this place possible for all of us. I’m grateful everyday for their expertise, help, and support.

Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer

Appointment year: 2002
Doctoral institution: Vanderbilt University
Fields of research: Applied mathematics, mathematical biology, mathematical ecology, mathematical epidemiology.

What it means to me be a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor:

It has always been about the people. I chose to work at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ because of the people I met when interviewing here — every single one was friendly, intellectually curious, helpful, and excited about what we could learn together. That has stayed true throughout.

Students regularly go above and beyond the call. On projects, they bring in experiences, coursework, and interests that form combinations only they could have developed. When challenged by new math topics, they inspire me by their engagement, time invested, willingness to try new study strategies, and overall devotion to learning. They build communities and support each other, in the classroom and beyond.

Faculty and staff here are also amazing. There are so many examples of dedication to excellence, solving complicated issues, and taking care of each other. Being surrounded by such enthusiasm and commitment helps my teaching every day. It really is all about the people.

Professor of English TherĂ­ Pickens

Appointment year: 2011
Doctoral institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Fields of research: 20th- and 21st-century African American / Arab American literature, African American literature and cultural studies, Arab American literature and cultural studies, Black feminism, cognitive impairment, disability, disability studies, gender studies, literary theory, mental health, physical impairment, spectacular fiction.

What it means to me to be a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor:

In the scholarly community, we often wrongly pit research and teaching against each other. I firmly believe that the two are synergistic. In my career, I find that being an engaged scholar allows me to be a better teacher.

In the years between receiving tenure, in 2016, and promotion to full professor, I wrote a book called Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke University Press, 2019); edited a collection, Arab American Aesthetics (Routledge, 2018); edited a special issue of African American Review, “Blackness & Disability” (2017); wrote five articles; and gave dozens of presentations at academic conferences and at colleges and universities the world over. All of that work — centering the theories, ideas, and creative endeavors of Black people, Arab Americans, disabled people — pressed me and others to think more explicitly about how to make a just world.

In doing this work and listening to people in various settings, I became even more convinced that the study of literature, and the humanities writ large, is vitally necessary to our world. These are lessons that we need desperately as we seek to tell better stories about, and do better work in, our current global situation and for what lies ahead.

Professor of Environmental Studies Sonja Pieck

Appointment year: 2007
Doctoral institution: Clark University
Fields of research: Biodiversity conservation, ecological restoration, environmental history, environmental movements, environmental politics, human geography, international development, memory studies.

What it means to me to be a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ professor:

The interdisciplinary spaces of the liberal arts are deeply appealing to me because I love drawing connections between different perspectives, theories, scales, places, interests, groups, and species. I believe environmental problems at their core derive from uneven power relations — among humans but also between human and non-human communities — and we need multifaceted and synergistic approaches to understand them and develop effective solutions.

And my students make some of the most interesting and creative connections of all. They bring curiosity and compassion to the classroom, along with a desire to do good in the world. It is an honor to partner with them in class and on thesis projects and help them become more informed, critically engaged people.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, I’ve long been interested in international and transnational environmental politics. I’ve worked in Latin America exploring environmental activism, especially in Peru and Ecuador, where I spent formative years of my life, and am now focusing my research on Germany, my country of origin. Throughout, I’ve felt supported in my work by the college and by smart, kind, and generous colleagues.

ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ continues to be an energizing and inspiring community of students, staff, and faculty.

When Sam Findlen-Golden ’20 of Amherst, Mass., first started at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, he wanted to try anything and everything that was available to him. “Just because it’s an option,” he says.

Since then, as he’s learned more about what interests him, he’s let go of some pursuits while taking a deeper dive into others — including both mathematics and the performing arts.

A mathematics major and French minor, he’s a member of the a cappella group Crosstones and the music director of the Robinson Players, the student theater company.

Video by Theophil Syslo.

For Findlen-Golden, math serves as an organizing principle in his life.  “Math manages to work its way into a lot of places that I didn’t expect,” he says. “It can be math in the perspective of music or through the perspective of history and education, which is a lot of what I’ve done here outside of academics.”

As he completes his math major, Findlen-Golden has similarly dived deep into biomathematics, learning how best to model the spread of diseases. Along the way, he’s learned how to embrace the more subjective side of his discipline.

Sam Findlen-Golden ’20 (left) and El Khansaa Kaddioui ’20 of Elhajeb, Morocco, talk with Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer during their biomathematics seminar in Hathorn Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“I’ve always been a very pure mathematician: I like working with straight numbers,” he explains. In the past, “whenever it gets into interpretability, like modeling complex behaviors or patterns in nature, I’ve always been a little intimidated because as much as I enjoy being creative, I also like things that have objective truth to them. There’s a bit of a simplicity in that.”

Yet once again, math has shown him a path, and he’s discovering new satisfaction as he’s explored biomathematics in his senior year, including epidemiology and disease spread.

“It’s shown me that there can be this beautiful blend of interpretability and subjectivity to something that is very objective. You have this objective language to describe subjective opinions and subjective patterns that can be modeled, interpreted in various ways.”

The world is watching the novel coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 600 people and infected more than 30,000 in China, and that has now spread to more than 25 other countries, including the U.S.

And of course ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is watching it too — and finding in this respiratory affliction some important lessons, particularly in how the disease gets around and the role played by individual choices.

During a microbiology class in January, the virus prompted Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks and her students to talk about how, in a sense, not all contagion is strictly microbial.

“We talked about how good information vs. unsubstantiated information about outbreaks can change people’s behavior,” she says, “and how you have to be extremely careful in the things that you’re forwarding on social media.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks advises caution when sharing information about the novel coronavirus. Don’t just forward something along “because it looked sensational.” (Theophil Syslo/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“You need to make sure that you’re pulling from a good reputable source and not just forwarding something because it looked sensational.”

The center of the outbreak in China, the city of Wuhan, offers a cautionary tale about the disease of bad information.

“Prior to the major public health machine getting going” and locking down travel in and out of the city, Banks says, “these sensational messages that were getting out caused something like 5 million people to evacuate,” many of them especially anxious to travel during the Chinese Lunar New Year. This during the eruption of a virus whose incubation period can take up to two weeks.

“So imagine if you were at the back end of that, and now you’ve traveled halfway around the world,” says Banks. “You could have been shedding virus, but asymptomatic, for almost two weeks before you would know that you were sick. So not the best idea.”

This Centers for Disease Control and Prevention illustration shows the spikes that adorn the outer surface of the 2019 novel coronavirus, which impart the look of a corona when viewed electron microscopically, hence the name “coronavirus.” (Alissa Eckert, MS, Dan Higgins, MAM)

The coronavirus outbreak has proven especially relevant to a senior seminar on biomathematics taught by Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer, whose published research helped to shed light on the spread of the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” virus at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ and elsewhere in 2009.

Greer’s students research and present topics related to biological applications of math, including modeling the spread of disease.

“This is a type of math that closely relates to other aspects of our lives and international life,” Greer told her students during a class session in late January. Mathematicians and public health officials deploy a variety of models to predict the spread and impact of disease.

For instance, a model that Greer has taught in the seminar uses differential equations, which are used to quantify change, to estimate how many people might catch a disease, as well as to predict its geographical spread.

The factors that drive a disease model include the length of the incubation period, the duration of typical infections, the population of the area where the disease first breaks out, and travel patterns.

Meredith Greer and students in a Hathorn Hall classroom during a January meeting of Greer’s course “Advanced Topics in Biomathematics.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“Air travel makes it possible for people to go pretty far pretty quickly, so the disease can go anywhere pretty fast,” Greer told the class.

Xuchong Shao ’20 of Shanghai put a fine point on the importance of the calendar in the spread of disease. The Lunar New Year, which took place at the end of January, is “pretty much like Thanksgiving break in the U.S.,” he said. “Everyone’s traveling to their home.”

“These questions of encouraging or discouraging travel have a big effect on disease spread, but it’s also really relevant to people’s customs,” Greer said. “There are not easy answers.”

If modeling can predict the spread of a disease, it can also tip off officials that their reporting might be off. In the case of novel coronavirus, that could happen because its symptoms can resemble a cold (also often brought to you by a coronavirus, albeit a different species) or influenza. And such cases might not be reported.

“If distances to which it’s spread or the rate of spread are inconsistent with the total number of people who are reported as being sick, that would be a clue that maybe not enough people have been reported as being sick,” Greer said.

Meredith Greer responds to a student’s remark during a session of “Advanced Topics in Biomathematics.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

At any rate, Greer told her class, it may be too early for a reliable model of novel coronavirus. Mathematicians, epidemiologists, and public health officials might have to compare and interrogate several models before a clear picture emerges.

As Lori Banks reminds us, influenza “is really a bigger public health concern.”

As always, it’s the unknown that’s the most unsettling aspect of a disease like novel coronavirus, and previously its coronavirus cousins, SARS and MERS. “They don’t know why it’s spreading,” Greer said. “They don’t know how many people will get it, or how many people will die, or how far around the globe it will spread.”

But all things in proportion.

As Lori Banks reminds us, influenza “is really a bigger public health concern. The good news is the precautions that people should take to prevent both of those viruses, both flu and novel coronavirus, are about the same” — wash your hands, cover your cough, don’t share food, don’t go blessing your friends and classmates with your presence when you’re feeling seedy.

But there’s one important difference, Banks notes. “If someone is exhibiting symptoms of a respiratory infection, and they’re sick enough to see a medical professional, they should probably call ahead” to allow that medical practice to prepare, just in case the culprit is novel coronavirus.

Lesson: Sine curves and daylight  

Class: “Mathematics Across the Sciences” 

Professor: Meredith Greer, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Program in Digital and Computational Studies 

It’s an eternal question for generations of math students: How am I going to use this in the real world? 

At ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Meredith Greer answers that question with an entire course, “Mathematics Across the Sciences.” It’s designed for both students who want to major in the natural sciences and need a strong math foundation, and those who need to fill a general education requirement. 

Students spend the course applying mathematics principles to real-life examples: They illustrate exponential growth by studying bacteria populations, measure earthquakes with logarithms, and use straight line equations to calculate the speed of human recall. 

“It gives them a sense of all the ways math really is used,” says Greer, an associate professor of mathematics and chair of the Digital and Computational Studies program. “It’s not just a separate area of study alone, but it’s really relevant.” 

Greer has taught “Mathematics Across the Sciences” in both fall and winter semesters, but it’s during the fall when she sees a special opportunity to make trigonometry click. 

Toward the end of the semester, when temperatures are dropping and the sun sets depressingly close to 4 p.m., Greer explains trigonometric functions like sine and cosine. 

Then, over the course of a class session or two, she has students collect data on the number of minutes of daylight Lewiston receives on days throughout the year. They do the same for Miami, then plot the data for both cities in an Excel chart. 

The chart’s regularly occurring peaks (the highest amount of daylight a city gets in the summer) and valleys (the lowest in the winter) constitute a classic example of a sine curve, or oscillation.  

Two results stand out. First, Lewiston’s curves from summer to winter and winter to summer are steeper than Miami’s. In other words, it’s true that when it gets darker in the fall, it gets darker ´Ú˛ą˛őłŮ±đ°ů.Ěý

Now here’s the cool part. We all know that Lewiston hurts for daylight in the winter. The chart bears this out, showing lower valleys at the winter solstice for Lewiston (nearly nine hours of daylight) than for Miami (10.5 hours). In mathematical terms, the sine curve representing Lewiston has a greater amplitude.

The reverse is true in the summer: Lewiston’s peaks are higher than Miami’s; the northern city gets about 15.5 hours of daylight, compared to Miami’s nearly 14. 

“What a lot of folks haven’t thought through is that if you get to the summer, they peak at this much lower level, and we peak much higher,” Greer says. “We have a lot more daylight in the summer.” 

Why? It has to do with the tilt of the earth’s axis. The farther north or south you go, the more widely the amount of daylight varies. It’s why the poles have six-month alternating periods of daylight and dark. 

For students, Greer says, working with daylight data at the end of the semester is one of the more immediate examples of the ways math can explain the world around us. 

“A logarithmic function, a sine or cosine function, e^x, 2^x — they’re not just developed and done in math class and nowhere else,” she says. “They’re intrinsically related to nature. There’s a reason they were developed, and they mean something still.” 

Kirk Read’s oral French course has long had a theatrical flair.

To teach lessons in vocabulary, grammar, and francophone culture, the professor of French and francophone studies conjured the fictitious Marie Malika d’Alger and created an episodic play, in French, about her life and adventures as a young Franco-Algerian woman.

For more than 20 years, Read gave the scripts to his students in hard copy. The students would learn the lines, create their own additions to the protagonist’s life and times, and take quizzes and tests that Read administered.

This year saw a change in the presentation of Read’s course. With support from the college’s Information and Library Services department, Read and a group of students spent last Short Term turning Marie Malika d’Alger into what’s known as an open educational resource (OER) — specifically, a website that anyone at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ and beyond can use freely.

In April, students in Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read’s oral French course perform a scene from Read’s Marie Malika d’Alger plays. From left, Kaylah Johnson ’21, Kate Carrier ’22, Jamie Kelleher ’19, Jake Michael ’21, and Emma Vlahakis ’20. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Read and his students are perhaps the most, ahem, dramatic example of efforts at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ to use advances in information technology to make course materials cheaper, more accessible, and more versatile.

Key to the college’s growing success in adopting OERs — or, more broadly, less-expensive course materials — is creating new partnerships across campus. To that end, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ librarians reach out to individual faculty members, and professors know that they can come to the library with their own ideas. Meanwhile, staff at the College Store review course materials and reach out to professors if there are cheaper options available.

The ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ library monitors the cost of course materials and helps faculty secure less-expensive alternatives, says Pat Schoknecht, vice president for information and library services and college librarian.

“We’re actively looking for the courses where the textbooks are really expensive, or those courses that have a very high enrollment even if the textbook isn’t that expensive,” says Pat Schoknecht, vice president of Information and Library Services and college librarian. “When we find them, we will go in and actively talk to the faculty member” about alternatives.

That could mean using an open educational resource, or OER, strictly defined as a material whose components are in the public domain and are free and open for anyone to use. It could also mean using an ebook or journal that the library licenses, or simply a less expensive textbook.

Recently, the library received a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation to join the and provide mini-grants to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty who review, use, or implement open access materials.

Long an economic challenge for students, required course materials — whether a copy of the Norton Anthology of American Literature ($50.65, used) for an English course or much more expensive textbooks in STEM disciplines or foreign languages complete with a code for online assignments — can run into the hundreds of dollars, potentially shutting students out of certain courses and majors.

Students pack the Ladd Library during the week before finals in April 2018. Students have sometimes pushed the library and their professors to explore alternatives to traditional textbooks.  (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

In response, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ has tried to make those costly materials available through Ladd Library: Since 2013, the library has kept a copy of every required course material on reserve, one of the few such programs of its kind. In addition, other campus offices, including the Office of Intercultural Education, maintain collections of frequently needed course materials.

What’s different now is that technology and the availability of OERs have caught up to the need.

“The resources and platforms have been upgraded to a point where they’re actually really good,” says Krystie Wilfong, an associate college librarian who works to gather and share open access materials. “The content the faculty needs is there, because a faculty from a different institution has written something they can then adopt.”

In 2011, the price of a book that Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer uses for her differential equations course rose “precipitously,” she said.

“It really helped to make the point clear in a way that I couldn’t ignore, and students let me know that that was a problem.”

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer works with students on Pi Day in 2018. Greer has used a variety of free or low-cost online textbooks for her math courses. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Greer found a cheaper textbook for that course, but the episode prompted her to try to minimize costs across all her classes. She took materials she had already created for graduate-level courses and adapted them for ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ juniors, and she pored over listservs and online repositories for math assignments.

For her multivariable calculus courses, she used free online materials by MIT mathematician Gilbert Strang, and Calculus I and II courses across the department transitioned to an this year.

Along with Kirk Read and Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton, Greer shared her story at an April symposium on open educational resources, organized by ILS, supported by the Dean of the Faculty’s office and the Davis Educational Foundation, and attracting librarians, booksellers, and informational technologists from 22 institutions in New England.

After assigning Strang’s material for several semesters, Greer surveyed the students who had used the online textbook and presented her findings to the attendees. Using the website had its drawbacks — students had to get used to navigating sections online as opposed to turning the pages of a book and writing notes in the margins — but they enjoyed the low cost, versatility, and accessibility.

Indeed, finding and using OERs benefits students in at least two ways: reduced cost and, in some cases, improved teaching.

In 2013, then a professor at Maine’s Unity College, Diaz Eaton was seeking resources to teach quantitative biology, an emerging and growing field that incorporates math and computer science. Colleges and universities were trying to develop new educational materials on the fly — but the experts from school to school weren’t necessarily talking to each other.

“People were reinventing the wheel at multiple institutions,” Diaz Eaton says.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton teaches a course on detecting misinformation in March. Diaz Eaton created QUBES, a hub for free biology course materials. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Now, at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Diaz Eaton is continuing her work with QUBES; this month she on making open access to biology education sustainable. She and her DCS colleagues are also working to incorporate open access into the structure of the nascent program. She makes sure to use free software to teach programming and involves students in designing her courses.

“We’re thinking about open access as being more than just digital access, but also access into DCS itself,” she says.

Kirk Read’s spring 2019 oral French course was the last to use traditional printouts or PDFs of the play Marie Malika d’Alger. The class now uses a dedicated website, which will be opened beyond the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ community by next year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

The ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students who helped Kirk Read redesign his oral French course last May felt similarly empowered. They were quick to grasp the benefits of OER, as well as some of its challenges, like how to compensate or reward scholars who invest time and talent to create the materials.

Now well into the first semester of the redesigned oral French course, Read and his students are liking the online version of Marie Malika d’Alger. Lessons and scripts are clearly organized, each image is licensed or copyright-free, and Read and his students thought through issues like how best to give assessments through the site and how to make the site accessible to users with disabilities.

And if a problem crops up during the course, Read can change the site on the fly. The course website is designed to be usable by anyone and everyone with some knowledge of French, and he plans to open it to outside users within the next year.

“The students get to own this text more than anything else,” Read says. “It’s online. I can upload a different PDF or talk about things they like better than what I propose. They’re not spending a dime for this, and it’s attractive and interactive. I’m totally happy with it.”

“If this is a way to start a conversation, then I am excited,” says Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer.

She’s talking about the assortment of oversized plush microbes in her Hathorn Hall office that reflect one of her research interests: mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

“Usually it’s how they spread through a population of people, although sometimes it’s how they reproduce and spread within a person’s body,” she says.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer poses with two of her plush microbes: a zombie virus and cyanobacteria. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

The plush figures, from the company GIANT Microbes, remind her of projects she’s worked on over the last 20-plus years. Each a gift from her husband, Brian Pfohl, they depict different cells and organisms more than a million times their actual size.

Pfohl initially purchased two. As Greer’s research or class projects shifted, he added new ones to the collection.

“These cute little pink ones,” she says, “are supposed to represent the virus that caused the outbreak of what was then called swine flu,” a disease she has studied extensively with her biology colleague Karen Palin. The algae one, she says, symbolizes the cyanobacteria she’s been working on for several years with Holly Ewing in environmental studies.

From left, closeups of GIANT Microbes: Ebola, Swine Flu, and Mad Cow. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

An Ebola microbe reminds her of her students who studied the deadly Ebola outbreak. And finally, there’s the “zombie” virus, “just making a joke about the zombie thing,” she says.

Greer has taught a First-Year Seminar on how one might model a zombie outbreak mathematically, an excellent way to use flow charts and modeling software to introduce students to college-level mathematics, she says.

Greer hopes that students who visit her office can see a playful side of mathematics and realize that math can be helpful in surprising ways.

The plushies “can be fun for students who also ask questions about doing math research on disease. It’s another way to talk about it,” she says.

They’ve served a more practical purpose, too. When her two daughters were younger, they provided a welcome diversion during office visits; ditto for the children of faculty colleagues or alumni who stop by her office for a visit.

Eighteen students in the course “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” have been going full tilt on a mock White House campaign since September.

And today, Oct. 25, full tilt becomes warp speed as the Republican and Democratic campaigns face what’s known in politics as an October surprise.

8:28 a.m. — It’s a crisis! (Well, not really)

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano steps to the lectern in a first-floor Pettigrew Hall lounge and gets right to the point.

“You’re being brought into a crisis that’s international in scope,” she tells the students seated before her. “And you’re being brought into the loop because it’s your job to help communicate the crisis, announce a plan to deal with it, and to calm the public.”

That’s not your average class assignment. Then again, Presidential Campaign Rhetoric isn’t your average course.

Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano announces the (not real) smallpox outbreak. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

8:32 a.m. — And the campaign is on!

Each campaign has already developed biographies and platforms, the Dems offering “Progress We Can Count On” and the Republicans, “The Future We Deserve.”

They’ve held conventions, deployed candidate videos, held debates, used polling data collected by a sociology course, consulted with a music course on campaign music, reacted to attack ads, and, today, have to face a crisis.

All that has drawn in hundreds of other students: “voters,” more than 600 at last count, who include all rhetoric and debate students plus students in 23 other ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ courses. “President Clayton Spencer has registered to vote, as have alumni and parents,” Kelley-Romano says.

From left, Republican campaign members Jacqueline Forney ’18 of Bloomington, Ind., Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston, and Honor Moshay ’17 of Los Angeles listen to the details of the public health crisis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

8:34 a.m. — It’s smallpox! (but not for real)

The “crisis” at hand is an outbreak of smallpox in the U.S., and the campaigns have until noon to develop a public statement that will inform and calm the nation while announcing a containment plan.

“I mean, smallpox is supposed to be eradicated,” says Gabe Nott ’17 of Bronxville, N.Y. He’s playing a Democrat from Maryland running for president. “Yeah, I know,” Kelley-Romano says, deflecting the implied question.

Another student tries to pull info from Kelley-Romano: “What vaccine do you need to prevent smallpox?” The professor doesn’t bite: “I don’t really know. Maybe you should check with the CDC.”

Gabe Nott ’17 of Bronxville, N.Y., is the Democratic candidate for president in the mock campaign that’s a key element of the course Presidential Campaign Rhetoric. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

8:40 a.m. — ‘A real disaster’

The campaigns spend the first half-hour or so figuring out what smallpox exactly is — a reminder that they’re young (or I’m old). Lots of us were aware of the last smallpox outbreak (1972 in Yugoslavia, killing 35 people), but these students were born between 1995 and 1996.

“Don’t fear monger.”

The Democrats’ candidate for vice president, Courtney Foster ’18 of Newton, Mass., notes that smallpox was “a real disaster” before being eradicated. Campaign manager Amanda San Roman ’17 of East Setauket, N.Y., responds that their statement doesn’t need to talk about the horrors of the disease. “The public is not already worried about smallpox. Don’t fear-monger,” she suggests.

A senior interviewer for Admission, San Roman has to switch hats because she’s got two interviews scheduled at Lindholm House. “Sorry, I can’t work on this now,” she says, and heads off.

At right is campaign manager Amanda San Roman ’17 of East Setauket, N.Y. Next to her is press secretary Ian Erickson ’18 of St. Albans, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

8:46 a.m. — Is it terrorism?

The campaigns have split up to work. Upstairs in the Republicans’ war room, they’re getting clues about how presidents handle health crises by watching, on a widescreen TV, how President Obama talked about Ebola in 2015. Downstairs, the Dems analyze Obama’s May 2016 briefing on the Zika virus.

Like the Dems, the Republicans are trying to grasp the historical scope of smallpox. They learn that smallpox was used as a biological weapon in the 18th century, when the British intentionally gave smallpox-infected items, including blankets, to Native Americans.

And now, smallpox and bioterrorism, plus some ambiguous hints in two official-looking memos given to the campaigns by Kelley-Romano, has the campaigns on high alert.

The Republicans’ presidential candidate, Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston asks her team, “Do we need to address that?” Downstairs, the Democrats ask the same question: “Are the Republicans going to go to national security?”

On the stool, Molly Chisholm ’17 of Boston, the Republican candidate for president, and her team review President Obama’s statement on Ebola. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

9:08 a.m. — ‘We need a lab coat’

On the question of whether to speak to the bioterrorism threat, Chisholm makes the call: “We need to talk about bioterrorism. As Republicans, we need to be the national security party.”

Following her lead, her team comes up with rhetorical tactics, and Honor Moshay ’17 of Los Angeles, the campaign’s media director, is a font of ideas: “Why don’t we get a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ EMS student to stand next to her during her address? We need a lab coat, too.” She adds, “Maybe we could get Paul Menice,” mentioning a well-known officer with Security & Campus Safety.

Matt Baker ’17 of Clinton, Md., Chisholm’s running mate, texts a friend who’s a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ EMS. “We got him,” he says.

Matt Baker ’17 of Clinton, Md., is the Republicans’ candidate for vice president. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

9:17 a.m. — A short walk to another world

When Kelley-Romano told Nott to check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she wasn’t kidding.

A little after 9, the campaigns leave Pettigrew, cross Alumni Walk, and enter Hathorn Hall for their meeting with CDC consultants, aka students in the course Mathematical Models in Biology, taught by Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer.

The Republicans, pictured, and the Democrats head into Hathorn Hall for their meeting with the CDC consultants, aka math students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

9:30 a.m. — ‘We have guests’

The short walk from Pettigrew to Hathorn takes the rhetoric students from one academic world to another. “We have guests,” Greer tells her students as the Democratic and Republican candidates and their staffs enter Hathorn 303.

The professors give a brief overview of the mock situation before the group splits in three: Democrats, Republicans, and students playing the media.

Greer and Kelley-Romano have teamed up before to deliver a public-health “crisis” to the PCR class. That was Ebola in 2014, when that disease was in the news.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer and Kelley-Romano brief the students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Chisholm, in fact, was part of a student team that worked with Kelley-Romano to tweak the course during her freshman year. “It’s really cool to see the interdisciplinary side of the course come into full effect,” she says.

 9:42 a.m. — Mars and Venus

According to the memos, two smallpox cases are in Massachusetts, where the Republican candidate, Chisholm, is governor, and two cases are in Washington, D.C., next door to Maryland, where Democrat Nott is governor.

The campaigns are meeting with the CDC consultants to develop a strategy for containing the smallpox outbreak in their home states.

It’s slow going at first as the two groups, rhetoric and math, weren’t quite sure what the other needs — Mars and Venus and all that.

“It was a tough barrier,” Chisholm says later. “They knew a lot about smallpox and not a lot about rhetoric. We knew a lot about rhetoric and not a lot about smallpox and modeling.”

The students’ discomfort is part of the plan, explains Greer. “They learn so much from working it out on their own.”

Moshay, the Republicans’ media director, asks what seems to be a reasonable question: “Can we quarantine a city?” The math students chuckle — from their reading, they know that large-scale quarantines are easier said than done.

Moshay tries again: “What are the typical responses to smallpox?” which elicits the most blackly humorous line of the day, from a math student: “Widespread panic and death.”

Math students Evan Goldberg ’19 (right) of Belmont, Mass., and Joseph Torres ’17 of Los Angeles work with the campaigns during their visit to the “CDC” in Hathorn Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

10:30 a.m. — ‘That was awesome’

Math student Gabe Whitehead ’17 of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who is working with the Republicans, uses a computational software called Mathematica to run various epidemic scenarios.

He pumps his fist: He’s figured out that a blend of vaccinations and quarantine measures for Chisholm’s home state of Massachusetts would result in a manageable death toll. Without a containment plan, the model predicts all-out catastrophe: 85,000 dead. With the plan, the deaths would number 7,000.

Whitehead shares graphs with the Republicans that show various scenarios. “When we got the graphs from Gabe, that was awesome,” said Chisholm.

“How can theory be used in current-day life?”

It also represented a communication breakthrough. “When we outlined what we wanted to do in our speech — dissuade fear and show the public that we have this under control — they were able to give us what they knew.”

Greer says her students were jazzed to link their knowledge with a real-world scenario. “They loved the feeling of working with data and with real disease ideas,” she says. “This project has an especially realistic feeling, one that is important to see in math classes. All this theory we have learned: How can it be used in current-day life?”

Math student Gabe Whitehead ’17 of Shaker Heights, Ohio, talks with the Republican campaign. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

10:53 a.m. — ‘We don’t want to sound paranoid’

The two campaigns head back across Alumni Walk to their Pettigrew war rooms to work on their smallpox statements, which they’ll deliver in the Digital Media Studios at noon.

Chisholm wants her statement to explicitly say that a foreign country might be to blame. She also says that the statement “has to be a rallying cry. We are still trying to win votes.”

Her campaign manager, James Erwin ’18 of Yarmouth, Maine, is more cautious. “We don’t want to sound paranoid.” A minute later, Moshay shows up with facemasks and a white lab coat for their ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ EMS person to wear.

The Republicans’ campaign manager, James Erwin ’18 of Yarmouth, Maine, plugs away on the statement. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

11:13 a.m. — “I don’t always know what I’m doing”

Amanda San Roman, the Dems’ campaign manager, who had to leave to do Admission interviews, returns. “I talk about this course in all my interviews,” she says because prospective students “are so impressed by it.”

She tells the prospies that the course “is more in depth than anything they’ve experienced before. And it ranges so far around campus. We have all different groups coming together and teaming up to make this as real as possible.”

And what does “real” feel like?

“Adrenaline,” San Roman says. “As a 21-year-old student, I don’t always know what I’m doing in this. But it’s cool to be going through it with people who are interested in it and who are trying really hard.”

The Republicans’ printed statement cleverly incorporated the campaign logo and those of FEMA and the CDC. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

11:29 a.m. — Thai chicken

A half-hour remains until each candidate has to deliver their address, and 95 percent of everyone’s attention is focused on prepping their statements.

Moshay speaks to group’s remaining 5 percent. “What’s for lunch?” she asks. “Thai chicken,” answers Michaela Britt ’17 of South Burlington, Vt., who handles video production for the campaign. “Oh, that’s good,” says Moshay. Then it’s back to work.

Moshay displays progress on their statement. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

11:55 a.m. — ‘We will not crumble’

Gabe Nott will deliver his statement first, and Foster, his running mate, tries to calm his nerves. “Stay calm and controlled,” she says.

“You know me,” he says with a tight smile. “If there are two things I am, it’s calm and controlled.”

The speech goes without a hitch. “Smallpox has been eradicated before, and it will be again,” he says, channeling every president from FDR to Obama. “We did not bow to Pearl Harbor…. We will not crumble now.”

Nott delivers his statement in the studio of the Digital Media Studios in Pettigrew Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen)

12:08 p.m. — “Stay calm and follow instructions”

While Nott delivers his talk alone at the lectern, Chisholm is flanked by the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ EMS student Sam Whitaker ’18 of Hollis, N.H., who plays a CDC staffer, and Erwin, her campaign manager.

Nott alludes to the possibility of bioterrorism without naming a country, saying that the “re-emergence of the disease could have been an intentional attempt to undermine American safety and well-being.”

The Republicans hit the bioterrorism angle, too, saying it’s “very unlikely” that the smallpox came from a U.S. source. Chisholm goes a step further, mentioning specifically that Russia has smallpox stocks and that the outbreak “is a new type of international terrorism to consider.”

“For the rest of us, it’s important to remain calm and follow instructions from public-health officials,” she says.

“We have faced crises of this magnitude in the past, and every time, our attention to detail, our intuition, and our deliberate approach has guided our country. Events such as these endure as memorable moments of strength and unity for our country.”

She concludes her speech by saying, “God bless America.”

Chisholm prepares to deliver her briefing. In background, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ EMS Sam Whitaker ’18 of Hollis, N.H., gets ready to play a CDC staffer who will stand by the candidate. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

12:18 p.m. — Is there a winner?

“They both did well with the specifics of containment and using action verbs to put themselves in the action and in the solution,” Kelley-Romano said.

Beyond the lessons of the day, Kelley-Romano puts a fine point on her course.

“I think life is interdisciplinary — a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ liberal arts education demands the simultaneous consideration of multiple fields of knowledge,” she says.

Rhetoric, specifically, “prepares students because it forces them to consider not only the construction and content of what they see and hear but also examines the medium — radio, television, film, and social media — and its impact.”

Chisholm, flanked by the Republicans’ video production staffer Michaela Britt ’17 of South Burlington, Vt., and Brennen Malone ’17 of Philadelphia, who plays the husband of Democratic presidential candidate Nott, confer with Kelley-Romano after the briefing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which of these college events did not lead to a sharp increase in flu cases on their respective campuses?

• July 4th social at the Air Force Academy.
• Orientation at Bowdoin.
• Homecoming at Colorado College.
• Two swine flu vaccine clinics at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝.

Trick question, really. All four events led to an uptick in flu cases at their respective colleges— even the vaccine clinics at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝.

During a vaccine clinic in October 2009, Miljan Zecevic ’10 receives his vaccine injection. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.

This curious fact, that a vaccine clinic could be linked to a surge in flu cases, is explained in a recent scholarly article, “The Effect of Mixing Events on the Dynamics of pH1N1 Outbreaks at Small Residential Colleges,” by ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ epidemiologist Karen Palin and mathematician Meredith Greer in the Journal of American College Health.

Of the many U.S. colleges that saw outbreaks of swine flu cases in the summer and fall of 2009, Palin and Greer looked at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Bowdoin, Colorado College and the Air Force Academy because of their similar size and their residential, undergraduate structure.

It’s a no-brainer that a college mingling event like homecoming or orientation would create robust opportunities for human-to-human spread of a virus. But the vaccine clinics at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, held on Oct. 10 and 15 four years ago in Chase Lounge, followed protocols that did not allow students to come into infectious proximity with one another. (The researchers stress, too, that vaccines and vaccine clinics are Very Good Things.)

Instead, suggest Palin and Greer, the role of the clinics in the spread of H1N1 at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in 2009 has to do with how those clinics influenced events outside Chase Hall, specifically student traffic patterns.

To investigate the spread of H1N1 during the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ outbreak, the researchers used a standard mathematical model that categorizes all community members as either susceptible to the disease, infected or recovered (hence the model’s acronym, SIR).

The SIR model assumes a small community that is “well-blended.” At a place like ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, “well-blended” means members live in close proximity and encounter each other in classrooms, residence halls, the library, club activities, athletics facilities, arts venues and, of course, in Commons.

“The SIR model did not match the reality we observed,” Greer says.

“ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is about as well-blended as any modern-day community,” says Greer, associate professor of mathematics.

Mathematician Meredith Greer found that the standard model for tracking the outbreak of disease didn’t work for the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ H1N1 outbreak of 2009. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.

Based on the initial ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ data, the SIR model suggested a slow, steady increase in flu cases. But what happened at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ was “in stark contrast” to the model’s predictions. Three days after each flu clinic (a common incubation time for H1N1), the number of cases at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ spiked.

Indeed, “the SIR model did not match the reality we observed,” Greer says.

But why? It wasn’t that students got infected at the clinic; a variety of established protocols made that very unlikely.

Instead, the researchers believe that the clinics created subtle changes in student traffic patterns on campus. Students took different routes to get from point A to point B, thus coming into contact not with more students on those days, but with different students.

Hosting a clinic may have “facilitat[ed] the spread of pH1N1 in unexpected and unknown ways,” the authors say.

Let’s say that on Oct. 15, 2009, student “Sarah” altered her routine by including the Chase Lounge vaccine clinic on her usual Parker-to-Pettengill afternoon route. In doing so, she came into contact with different students than usual, giving a hug to one she hadn’t seen in awhile and who, unbeknownst to her, was infectious.

It doesn’t stop there. If Sarah changed her routine, then maybe her roommate “Jessica” also changed hers, even if she didn’t plan to attend the clinic. And so on.

All of this means that “the concept of ‘well-blended’ is more complicated than originally thought,” Greer says.

Take Commons. At ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, all students dine under one roof, blended together like stir-fry. A germophobe’s nightmare, right?

Karen Palin, an epidemiologist and lecturer in biology at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, discusses the H1N1 outbreak at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in October 2009. With her is is Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.

Not really, says Palin, who had her students study Commons in another context. For one, they found that food-serving areas are remarkably free of germs, “which we expected,” Palin says, “given their protocols.”

Second, they found that students tend to sit with the same friends each meal, reducing the blending and lowering the likelihood that Commons was a major reason for the spread of H1N1.

“Again, this led us to the idea that changing social patterns [due to the clinics] could really be the culprit in spreading H1N1 in 2009,” Greer says.

Palin and Greer stress that their findings are not prescriptive; they “cannot by themselves determine circumstances in which vaccine clinics should, or should not, be offered.”

Instead, their results are more observational, intended to identify “when a vaccine clinic apparently functions as a mixing event” that disrupts normal student traffic patterns, hastening the spread of an infection.

And if you still want advice for the current or any flu epidemic?

“Get vaccinated, wash your hands, and cover your mouth if you cough or sneeze,” says Palin.