“Great work, Hannah and Emma!”⁣

That jubilant shoutout came from geology professor Mike Retelle, who posted his congrats right after his honors thesis advisees, Hannah Johnson ’20 of Brewster, Mass., and Emma Wheeler ’20 of Paradis, Norway, submitted their geology theses.⁣

He also included a happy photo of Johnson and Wheeler in survival suits prior to their plunge into a Norwegian fjord last summer.

For �ֲ���ý seniors, the honors thesis is the pinnacle of academic achievement — never more so than this year, as seniors and their faculty advisers had to make the sudden move to remote learning due to COVID-19. Moved from the original March deadline, honors were due April 1.

Despite the disruption, there was continuity: �ֲ���ý professors supporting their advisees.⁣

“Beginning with field work in the Arctic, which involved hiking over rough terrain and riding in small rubber boats in all kinds of weather, Hannah and Emma have been incredibly great to work with — always positive and always thinking,” said Retelle. ⁣

Hannah Johnson ’20 and Emma Wheeler ’20 pose in survival suits during safety training at the University Centre in Svalbard, prior to the start of summer 2019 fieldwork, which entails travel by boat. They’re about to jump into the fjord to test their suits. ⁣(Photograph by Mike Retelle)

The two theses draw on fieldwork that Johnson and Wheeler conducted with Retelle and other scientists in Svalbard, Norway. The former’s thesis looks at “Late Glacial to Holocene Sea Level History of Kapp Linne, Svalbard.” The topic of the latter is “A Hydroclimate Reconstruction in the Changing High Arctic Environment, Linnédalen, Svalbard.”⁣

Johnson sampled boulders on old shorelines with a hammer and chisel to determine the ages of the shorelines and reconstruct sea level during the retreat of the last ice sheet, as the Svalbard ice sheet 20,000 years ago is an analog of what is happening in Antarctica and Greenland today.

“After she came back she worked at the University of Vermont to dissolve the rock samples in hydrofluoric and perchloric acid, wearing hazmat gear,” Retelle explains.

Meanwhile, Wheeler’s project entailed recovering samples from a glacial lake to reconstruct its hydrology. “Her fieldwork required hauling a mooring by hand over the gunnels of a Zodiac boat, and then recovering samples and electronics from the mooring,” Retelle says. 

During summer 2019 fieldwork in Svalbard, Hannah Johnson stands at an outcrop above Linnévatnet, a lake at Spitsbergen, Svalbard. The white quartzite behind her is pockmarked with weathering pits. (Photograph by Mike Retelle)

Wheeler remembers what inspired her to choose geology as a major: a single image.

“After my first year, I remember seeing a picture �ֲ���ý had posted of two students, one standing on the other’s shoulders, inspecting a small, strange-looking bucket on top of a three-legged structure.”

The caption, she recalls, “said something about students doing research in the High Arctic with Professor Mike Retelle. My immediate reaction was, ‘Wow, I want to go there and do that’ — even though I wasn’t even really sure what ‘that’ was!” (She now knows the photo depicted the weather station in the Linné Valley on Svalbard. The bucket records precipitation).

“He is always ready to talk about anything, sediment-related or not!”

“Emma and Hannah are also mentally tough — just ask their coaches,” said Retelle. Wheeler is a three-time NCAA champion with the rowing team and a French translator for a local program that provides legal services for asylum-seekers. Johnson is a swim captain who was part of the team’s record-setting 200-yard medley relay at this year’s NESCACs.⁣

Emma Wheeler ’20 (left) and Inger Marie Aasberg, a student at the University Centre in Svalbard, do geochemical analyses of their sediment cores last September at the R.B. Gilmore XRF lab at the University of Massachusetts. (Photograph by Mike Retelle)

Typically, seniors would upload their theses from the comfort of their campus residence or the library, then celebrate with friends. That part was missing this year, but not the pride of achievement.

“Submitting online from home was not how I envisioned how this project would end,” said Johnson. “But I am still really proud of this accomplishment and incredibly grateful for the thoughtful guidance from Mike throughout this whole process. Not being at �ֲ���ý and having face-to-face interactions was difficult, but Mike quickly replaced those with Zoom meetings.”

“Mike has been an incredible mentor,” Wheeler adds. “Not only has he shared his extensive knowledge of and experience in Arctic geology, but he is always ready to listen to new ideas or think through questions I have presented.

“He also really cares about his students, and is always ready to talk about anything, sediment-related or not!”

Various shelves and closets, both in and around Jane Costlow’s office in Hedge Hall, are filled with bound senior theses from years gone by.

Costlow selects one and reads the acknowledgement. The senior thanked Costlow for “an enlightening process” during a time when Costlow was “dealing with hard times herself. She made herself available and helped me through my own.”

Costlow wonders about the “hard times” reference. Checking the date, 2009, she remembers: “That was the year my father died.” Such touching acknowledgments are a “reminder of these wonderful students I’ve had,” Costlow says.

Jane Costlow reads the acknowledgments from a former student’s senior thesis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The college’s Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, Costlow is now in her 34th and final year in the �ֲ���ý classroom. Adding it all up, she’s advised well over 100 thesis students in her career.

“The heart of the thesis experience is having a student who comes once a week and sits in your office and talks with you about this topic that they’re having the pain and the pleasure of getting to know a lot better, that they’re really diving into,” she says.

In that sense, it’s timeless, no different from when Costlow first began. “I really love the one-on-one interaction.”

Jane Costlow meets with thesis student Erin O’Farrell ’20, environmental studies major from Burke, Vt., who is writing on the photography from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico with an environmental perspective. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The one-on-one model is also intensive, making the month of March a notorious crunch time for both seniors and professors, coming in like a lamb and going out like a lion as seniors generate reams of thesis pages for their advisers in advance of the April 10 submission deadline.

As March progresses, says Costlow, faculty “get more bleary-eyed just because of how many pages they have to read.”

Easing the load somewhat in recent years is a new thesis option for environmental studies majors. Instead of a traditional independent thesis, they can choose to take a seminar course called “Environmental Writing in the Public Sphere.”

Environmental studies major Hermione Zhou ’21 of Shenzhen, China, speaks with Costlow about possible thesis topics for next year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Costlow taught the seminar last year, guiding students in major projects including documentary film and long-form digital journalism, such as podcasts. “They’re really useful formats and genres for students to learn about producing work for which they still have to do all of the deep research” required for a traditional thesis.

One of her 2019 seminar students, Hugh Kenny ’19, produced a film about the Auburn, Maine, agricultural zone; now he’s working as a communications fellow and videographer for the Piedmont Environmental Council, a land trust in Virginia.

This semester, Grace Ellrodt ’20 of Lenox, Mass., started as one of Costlow’s thesis advisees then switched to the thesis seminar, a better fit for a project that grew out of work she’d done in Chile and Colombia investigating the public health issue of loneliness among older people. Ellrodt’s project includes a photography exhibit and website — a launching pad, she hopes, for a career in digital public-health journalism.

Grace Ellrodt ’20 discusses her thesis in Costlow’s Hedge Hall office at the beginning of the fall 2019 term. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It’s no coincidence that many of Costlow’s thesis advisees are interested in film and photography. Costlow, who for many years taught in the college’s Russian program, teaches courses in environmental literature and over the years has expanded her interest in visual culture.

“It’s something I always did when I was teaching Russian because it’s such a fabulous way to give a rich, complex sense of the culture. And our students are really visual,” she says. “In environmental studies, we do a lot of class work in looking at documentaries and photographic traditions that have been really important in American environmentalism.”

For example, one of her current thesis students, Ava Gulino ’20 of Wilmington, Del., is focusing on the island of Antigua to explore the connection between tourism and photography. “She’s looking at how Antigua gets represented and marketed as a ‘paradise,’ and what that marketing tends to obscure or erase,” Costlow explains. “And then, within that context, she’s also looking at what it might mean to be a mindful and responsible visitor.”

Ava Gulino ’20 of Wilmington, Del., meets weekly with Costlow in her office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Costlow herself has just finished writing a paper that is, in part, about contemporary Russian photography. “It’s a good example of how my own work and student work can overlap in some ways.”

At �ֲ���ý, the thesis experience varies enormously from one academic division to another. In the social sciences and especially in STEM disciplines, for example, thesis topics often reflect a faculty member’s research, with students becoming integral members of their adviser’s lab.

“And that’s really exciting,” Costlow says, noting how meaningful it is for students of environmental studies colleague Holly Ewing to do field research on water quality on Lake Auburn, read the literature, and then make sense of it.

For majors in the humanities, the experience and approach is different, Costlow says. “It almost always involves letting the student become the expert,” she says. “The student becomes the person who, in a way, is teaching you.” The student, in a way, becomes the “sage on the stage.”

Jane Costlow describes the joy of senior thesis advising and how she helps seniors develop their topics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Often, her advisees will choose a subject about which she knows very little; in that situation, Costlow’s approach as adviser is to ask good questions and push back against assumptions. “It’s up to them to develop expertise and read broadly within the relevant literature.”

She worked with one thesis writer who was investigating the treatment of elephants in northeastern India. Costlow knew little about the topic and learned a lot — an experience, she says, that can mean “really stretching yourself as a teacher to think about how you can be helpful.”

The theses on the shelves in and around Costlow’s office don’t just sit there. She pulls out certain ones to show current seniors how past writers have approached a certain topic.

Costlow inspects thesis binders stored in an environmental studies area in Hedge Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

One favorite was a thesis written by Patricia Noto ’12, now a landscape designer at G2 Collaborative, who explored how colleges and universities developed farms and gardens on campus. After writing an outstanding thesis, she wrote a proposal for how �ֲ���ý could develop such an operation.

Of course, there are the infamous bumps, if not complete washouts, on the thesis road.

There are the advisees who, week after week, refuse (or say they forgot) to try a new approach or resource. Costlow recalls asking a student to consult with one of the college’s research librarians. “Our librarians are incredibly valuable sources of insight — not just information. They give student tools they’ll use all their lives.”

But week after week, the student reported that he’d not yet done so. Finally, in the dying days of the semester, the student had the meeting. “Wow!” the student exclaimed to Costlow afterward. “I should have gone to see him months ago!”

Costlow chuckles at the memory. “My only regret was that I didn’t have him on video, so I could show all my thesis students.”

When it comes to evaluating and grading this pivotal capstone, the thesis is “completely unlike any other grading experience,” Costlow says.

Costlow discusses thesis ground rules with fall semester thesis advisee Lars Schuster ’20 as he embarks on his study of offshore wind farms in New England. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

With each student, she tries to have an initial conversation, an up-front opportunity to discuss what’s involved in writing a thesis and what she expects a student to do in terms of source materials and bibliography, so that she has something to return to when she needs to say, “This is really not adequate.”

That rarely comes to pass, partly because, she finds, the students are really grading themselves, “sort of playing against themselves. They’ve set a standard of what they’re capable of, and you hope they live up to it. And you hope they set high goals for themselves.

“That’s my way of saying that I have different expectations for different thesis students based on my understanding of who they are as a student.”

Costlow opens a senior thesis by Colin Schless ’04 titled “Two Roads Maine: A Study of the Nature in Healing.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

And then there are the students who blow off their regular meetings. At that point, Costlow isn’t going to play games. “I say, ‘You know what? You’re close to graduating. You’re grown up. If you think you can pull this off without my input, give it a try.’”

One student never came in to see her and spent the last 10 days of the semester camped out in the program’s lounge writing day in, day out. “He handed in an amazing thesis — for the first chapter and a half. Then it just fell completely apart.”

And then there are the big kahunas: the year-long honors theses. A memorable advising experience transpired last year with an advisee who investigated the concept of dignity and migrant labor in her home state, North Carolina, where Costlow also grew up.

“It was just a sheer joy to work with her,” she says, because the thesis embodied the powerful interdisciplinarity of environmental studies, incorporating political and intellectual history, ethnography, and nonfiction creative writing. The alumna has gone on to work with migrant laborers in the South.

Costlow reads a thesis acknowledgment. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As the month of March marches toward the end of the winter semester, Costlow approaches the conclusion of her thesis advising. She opens another black binder and reads the acknowledgment: “I enjoyed our meetings where we not only discussed subjects pertaining to my thesis, but also current events, activism, and personal stories. I will miss those meetings.”

So will Costlow.

When Sarah Rothmann ’19 arrived at �ֲ���ý from Andover, Mass., she had three goals: good grades, fast times in cross country and track, and, by graduation, a job.

“I just didn’t want to take any risks,” she recalls. But as one semester led to the next, “I learned to step beyond” those initial goals. Way beyond, it turns out.

By senior year, Rothmann was editor of The �ֲ���ý Student while also serving as co-captain of her cross country and track and field teams. An English major, she completed an honors thesis on the autobiographic fiction of Charles Dickens.

Video by Theophil Syslo

A minor in education studies with experience in local schools, she discovered a connection between teaching and journalism that had eluded her.

“I thought it was an either/or,” she says of her interest in the two fields. “But I’ve learned that they blend very nicely.” As editor, she’s “almost assumed the role of a teacher to help my writers navigate a path.”

As for that job? She recently accepted a Fulbright Student award to teach English in the Czech Republic in 2019–20.

Two years ago, as part of a sociology class on power and inequality, Abby Westberry ’19 helped map the locations of shelters and other services for people experiencing homelessness in the Lewiston-Auburn area. In so doing, Westberry learned of a group not often included in discussions about homelessness: those who live for months or even years in motels.

The motels tend to be two or three miles away from the Twin Cities’ downtowns — outside the range of public transportation, and a long walk for someone wanting to get to a housing office or jobs center.

Westberry learned that “individuals in motels struggled to access these services based on their physical isolation,” she says.

She has just completed her senior honors thesis, “‘Before its Smell Became Me’: Motel Residency and the Politics of Belonging,” on the topic of motel residency and its connection to housing insecurity.

Sociology major Abby Westberry ’19 of Readfield, Maine, poses on the outskirts of Lewiston. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

She’s one of the very first academic researchers to tackle the subject.

“She’s onto something that’s received very little attention in the academic literature,” says Professor of Sociology Emily Kane, who taught the original class on power and inequality and who was Westberry’s thesis adviser.

American motels emerged in the mid-20th century as inexpensive and convenient accommodations for motorists. With no background checks or upfront costs (like a security deposit) for customers, they often become the last resort for people who can’t afford to rent an apartment, or whose eviction histories or criminal records make them ineligible for other housing.

News outlets like the and have documented the lives of motel residents. The Florida Project, a feature film about a child living in a rundown motel near the opulence of Disney World, won a variety of accolades.

But when Westberry looked for scholarly research on long-term motel residency, she found relatively little — just one study on how motel residents access food, and a nonfiction book, Exiled in America, on the lives of a single motel’s occupants. (Westberry will defend her thesis in front of a panel that includes that book’s author, Kent State sociology professor Christopher Dum.)

Undeterred, this year Westberry interviewed more than a dozen residents of several motels in Lewiston-Auburn, as well as people who work at service providers like shelters, legal firms, and prisoner reentry groups. She used a method called community-based research, in which community partners, such as service providers, guide the framing of the research project.

Westberry has had plenty of opportunities for community-engaged learning and research. After volunteering in local schools through the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, she took several community-engaged courses. This summer, she received a Ruggles Fellowship to support her research on motels.

“Research doesn’t matter if it’s not put to good use,” she says. “You should make it meaningful to people’s lives. When you actually go and ask people what they need, not only do you find a lot of subjects that need to be researched, that require academic attention, but you also get knowledge that meaningfully helps those communities — not necessarily coming from me, but coming from community partners.”

Professor of Sociology Emily Kane, Westberry’s thesis adviser. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

After interviewing the motel residents, Westberry took care to maintain confidentiality by using pseudonyms, omitting mention of illegal activity involving the interviewees, and combining the actual motels into one fictional establishment, Valleyview.

By talking to the residents of Valleyview about how they came to live in the motel, their positive and negative experiences, and their own recommendations for policy changes, Westberry concluded that motel residency reinforces housing instability, though the residents support each other and form strong communities.

Motel life is inherently isolating, Westberry found. Valleyview is miles away from town, along roads without sidewalks. If a resident doesn’t have a car, holding down a job, attending a community event, or visiting a social service provider means walking for hours.

A motel room generally can’t be a mailing address, which means residents have to take extra steps to do things like receive mail, sign up for services, or vote. The rooms themselves might have a microwave but no other cooking facilities, so residents’ only option is processed foods. Often several people share a small space, fraying tempers.

Paradoxically, even though paying for a motel room from month to month would cost less over the course of a year, some residents can only afford to pay a week at a time. “They can’t build up their money, so they end up paying more overall just because they don’t have the saved capital,” Westberry says.

Gaps in social services can make it difficult to move out of a motel. Motel residency doesn’t fall under the definition of homelessness that many funding agencies use, meaning residents can’t access the services that receive state and federal funding — or they technically make too much money to qualify for income-based programs.

Of course, motel residents themselves already know this, as do some of the social service providers who work with them. Janice Lara-Hewey, a social worker at Catholic Charities Maine, used to run a homeless outreach program that, at times, included motel residents.

Lara-Hewey has seen the same realities that Westberry outlined in her thesis — indeed, she told Westberry about some of them: The nearest grocery store might also be the most expensive, you might have to lug a load of laundry to the laundromat without a car, or you might miss an appointment with a social service agency because of another emergency.

But Lara-Hewey points out that those challenges are not unique to motel residents, and the same systems that lead to motel residency — things like skyrocketing housing costs, inadequate funding for public housing and social services, lack of access to good food — also lead to people living in shelters and cars, or veterans facing homelessness, or college students not being able to find adequate food.

“It’s not just about people who are in motels,” she says. “It’s about people in general, and people who are struggling, and the importance of all of us being kind and compassionate, and understanding that, for most of us, we’re one emergency away from being in the same boat.”

Some residents had felony records or sex offender status that made them ineligible for public housing.

Despite the difficulties, Westberry found that people in motels form strong friendships and networks of support, ranging from giving each other rides into town to lending a microwave or money in a pinch.

“You saw that particularly among members of the community who were recently incarcerated, where they formed a lot of support networks amongst each other to work through all of the vast changes they were experiencing,” she said.

Westberry hopes to show the thesis to the community partners she interviewed and worked with, in order to influence future policies. She asked residents what local services could do to help them specifically, to “make sure recommendations and solutions we’re proposing toward community issues derive from the needs of individuals affected,” she said.

Solutions that help long-term motel residents could include investing in more public housing, expanding public transportation to reach motels, broadening definitions of homelessness so that motel residents are eligible for more programs, and modifying tenancy rules so motel residents have greater protections against removal.

“I wanted something that wouldn’t just sit on the shelf at the end of the day and molder away,” Westberry said. “I want something that’s derived from a community-based need and seeking to address community issues. I do think that that’s a really valuable way to conduct research.”

As they amass a body of work to show in �ֲ���ý’ Senior Thesis Exhibition, what are some of the big lessons for this year’s studio art majors?

There are practical skills: Planning and time management. Understanding when to experiment and conceptualize — and when to cut to the chase and start producing. Learning to see through the eyes of people you hope to communicate with.

The 2019 Senior Thesis Exhibition artists talk about their work.

But there are also “softer” takeaways whose value, in fact, may surpass career considerations and play directly into life satisfaction.

There’s the power of consultation, companionship, and collaboration, for example. “Especially in the first semester, we spent a lot of time looking at each other’s work,” says Flannery Black-Ingersoll of Concord, N.H., one of the 14 senior artists in this year’s exhibition, which opens April 5.

“That’s very instructional, both for how you look at your own art and what you ask questions about, but also building that camaraderie in the studio space,” she says, meaning the Olin Arts Center studios that are each shared by several students. “‘Okay, what do you think of this?’ ‘Is this ridiculous?’ ‘Do you have any ideas?’ — sort of feeding off each other.

“It’s this nice bubble of artistry, which people look for beyond college.”

And then there are the lessons that are basically good for one thing, but a highly important thing: a laugh. Stuck at one point in her work, which involves fabric, ceramics, paint, and wood, Black-Ingersoll was inspired to try to integrate cheesecloth into the concept.

For her and studiomates Jo Cunningham and Daisy Diamond, cheesecloth was The Answer — until it wasn’t. “It was late at night,” says Black-Ingersoll. “We were all freaking out because we just had this genius moment. But of course it didn’t happen.”

That’s because she subsequently heard that a thing for cheesecloth is a typical developmental stage for first-year art school students. “So I didn’t end up doing that.”

At top, Daisy Diamond works with art, steel, and fabric in her Olin studio. At left, Grace Link ’19 hangs her photographs with help from Haley Crim ’19. At right, Mickai Mercer ’19 places his drawings in the art museum’s Upper Gallery. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Pamela Johnson, associate professor of art and visual culture, advised the senior artists during the winter semester, and Penelope Jones, visiting assistant professor of art, was the fall semester adviser.

2019 Senior Thesis Exhibition artists

For Emerson Krull ’19, the topic of her senior thesis was as near as her father’s business and as remote as the post-World War II era.

An environmental studies major with a concentration in art history, Krull has spent much of this year researching the so-called Case Study Houses of Southern California: a series of designs  intended to model efficient, affordable housing for military veterans coming home after the war.

Specifically, Krull’s thesis analyzes ways in which those designs have inspired today’s environmentally sustainable houses.

Emerson Krull ’19 poses at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art, where she was a curatorial intern for exhibitions including the current Anthropocenic. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Thirty-seven were designed, of which 25 were built (seven were later torn down or substantially remodeled). Most of the finished houses were photographed by Julius Shulman, whom Krull describes as “an iconic photographer of modern architecture generally, and specifically of the buildings of Southern California.”

Shulman, for instance, was responsible for a Case Study House image that has become emblematic of Los Angeles luxury (bottom image): two women taking their ease in the glass-walled living room of Case Study House No. 22, seemingly hovering in space high above the city lights.

And Shulman, who died in 2009, was represented by Craig Krull Gallery, located in Santa Monica and owned by Krull’s father. It was through her father and the gallery that Emerson Krull became aware of Shulman’s Case Study House work and the project itself.

Shown in a period photo by renowned photographer Julius Shulman, Case Study House No. 22 (the Stahl House) has become an icon of California architecture. (Julius Shulman Photography Archive, 1936-1997 © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

“I always loved the photos and the simple, clean-lined modern design” of the Case Study Houses, she says. “They weren’t really thinking about it as sustainable back then — that wasn’t even a term — but today they can be good examples of sustainable design.”

A Santa Monica native, Krull is passionate about the Southern California landscape at its best, notably the visual harmony between its natural and built environments — a harmony, she says, that she discovered through Shulman’s images.

No. 22, the Stahl House, may be the best-known example of a characteristic shared by many of the Case Study Houses: their thoughtful placements into the natural setting and their expansive use of glass to visually integrate outdoors and indoors.

“That integration is so perfect for the Southern California landscape,” says Krull, whose thesis research last summer included a visit to the Stahl House (which is still in the hands of the Stahl family). “We have pretty good weather, so it makes sense to utilize the land around the house and not just have it be a box on a street. Those architects really used the land and used the views they were given.”

A contemporary view from the Stahl House. (Emerson Krull ’19)

The houses were a project of Arts & Architecture magazine and editor John Entenza, who recruited a host of notable architects, including such eminences as Charles Eames Jr. and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra, and Pierre Koenig — designer of No. 22 — to try to set a course for postwar housing in LA.

“[C]hosen not only for their obvious talents, but for their ability to evaluate realistically housing in terms of need, [they] have been commissioned to take a plot of God’s green earth and create ‘good’ living conditions for eight American families,” Entenza wrote in his announcement of the program, in the magazine’s January 1945 issue. (Of course, the eight-house goal fell by the wayside.)

In general, “the designs balance a consideration for the economy, society and the environment,” Krull explains.

Reflecting the optimism and energy of the time, they would employ building technologies that emerged from the war, and they would be replicable — “in no sense…an individual ‘performance’” by the architect, Entenza stipulated.

Each would seek to fulfill “the specifications of a special living problem in Southern California,” such as the peculiarities of a given site or the needs of a specific family. For instance, Case Study House No. 1, designed by J.R. Davidson with Greta Davidson, needed to be easy to clean and maintain to accommodate the busy lives of its inhabitants, a childless two-career couple.

The Case Study Houses program outlasted the postwar circumstances that inspired it, and the houses were built, mostly in and around Los Angeles, from 1948 until 1966. (Koenig’s CSH No. 22 was built in 1960.) Yet the program retained its experimental outlook.

Sustainability as we know it was not on the radar of Entenza and the CSH architects. But, as Krull shows in her thesis, aspects of CSH design did anticipate contemporary thinking about green design in aspects like functional efficiency, respect for natural aspects of the building site, openness to natural light and ventilation, etc.

This Julius Shulman image gives a sense of the immediate surroundings of the Stahl House. (Julius Shulman Photography Archive, 1936-1997 © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

Though an ES major, Krull is approaching her thesis from a visual art perspective. (A curatorial intern at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art in her sophomore and senior years, Krull helped put together this winter’s major exhibition, Anthropocenic). In an unusual cross-disciplinary arrangement, her thesis adviser, in fact, is Ned Harwood, associate professor of art and visual culture.

Harwood, she says, “really helped me understand the historical precursors or precedents to the Case Study House program. He’s provided me with knowledge on the context of the Great Depression, European functionalism, and even early socialist thought, and how these all came to influence the program.”

The Stahl House living room and pool today. (Emerson Krull ’19)

“Emerson’s smart, very engaged, unbelievably well-organized, and a self-starter,” says Harwood. He adds, with a laugh, that students often proclaim plans to do thesis work the summer before senior year —  “but Emerson actually did it.”

Starting before she arrived at �ֲ���ý, Krull has undertaken a variety of internships related to the visual arts in the Los Angeles region — notably a 2017 stint at the Getty Research Institute, where she did archival work on a collection of images by the noted architectural photographer Lucien Hervé.

The thesis research has given her a head start in understanding sustainable architecture in her home state, a place on the cutting edge of green consciousness. “I’m increasingly interested in working in that field after �ֲ���ý,” she says.

She adds, “Personally, doing this thesis has been the most inspiring and uplifting project in my time at �ֲ���ý — an opportunity to research a very specific topic that combines all of my passions, interests, and experiences.”

Photographer Julius Shulman took this Case Study House image that has become emblematic of Los Angeles luxury. (Julius Shulman Photography Archive, 1936-1997 © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

“Here I go,” says a somewhat pensive Zsofia Duarte ’18 as she lowers her index finger toward the track pad of her laptop.

And with a click, Duarte clears the biggest and most pressure-packed hurdle of her thesis project: the online submission of her 115-page document to the college’s searchable scholarly database known as SCARAB.

Duarte is sitting in a quiet part of Ladd library; appropriately, she’s near the �ֲ���ý history section. While she’s flying solo as she navigates the various dropdown menus of the SCARAB form, this pivotal moment is bookended by friendship and community.

“Wow. I just want to sit here and stare at it for awhile.”

Earlier, friends surrounded her for a �ֲ���ý tradition, in which first-years help seniors bind a hard copy of the thesis (hard copies aren’t always required, but seniors love the tradition). Later, she’ll go to dinner with friends at a cozy Lewiston restaurant, Boba, famed for its fusion of French and Asian cooking.

She clicks the pad, the file uploads, and she’s greeted by an official-looking confirmation form. “Wow,” she says. “I just want to sit here and stare at it for awhile.”

An environmental studies major and one of the college’s Community Engaged Research Fellows, Duarte examined the local food movement as it plays out at the Lewiston’s farmers market, specifically looking at the experiences of Somali Bantu food producers.

Friends surround Zsofia Duarte ’18 after the traditional binding of her senior honors thesis.

While all �ֲ���ý seniors complete a thesis or capstone project, a select few — less than 10 percent of the class — are invited to conduct a supercharged version of thesis, the honors thesis.

An honors thesis is an academic triathlon. It’s months of research, often beginning in the junior year; months of writing and revising under the guidance of a faculty adviser; and then the submission and concluding defense, in which a committee of scholars interviews and challenges the thesis conclusions.

In the summer as I train for �ֲ���ý cross country, I run over wooded trails, so I’m constantly on the lookout for ticks. All I know about these tiny arachnids is that they carry dangerous diseases, such as Lyme.

Ben Tonelli ’18, a double major in biology and religious studies, is also a cross country runner. But his honors-thesis research in biology means he can look at ticks from a scientific perspective.

Last year, Tonelli took biology professor Donald Dearborn’s Short Term course in avian biology. He learned that migrating songbirds can transport ticks southward as they leave Canada and the northern U.S. during the fall.

“Until Ben’s model, we haven’t had a sense of where the redistribution might occur.”

Intrigued, he planned do his thesis research in the field, looking at songbirds and the ticks they carry — that is, until last summer’s biomedical engineering internship pointed him a different, more computational direction.

The result is unique: Tonelli has created the first mathematical model to visually illustrate the movement of ticks as they hitch rides with songbirds migrating south.

“We’ve known for a long time that some southbound songbirds carry ticks, but until Ben’s model, we haven’t had a sense of where the redistribution might occur and the possible scale of that effect,” Dearborn says. “Ben has connected the dots of existing research.”

As tick-borne illnesses continue to spread both , Tonelli hopes his research will help scientists identify emerging public-health risks. “This is a topic people deal with in their daily life,” he says.

What inspired your thesis?

After I took Don’s Short Term, we talked about doing something field-based for my thesis. Then, last summer I worked at the University of Vermont and studied under and other researchers involved in biomedical engineering.

Tonelli’s experience in an avian biology Short Term course taught by Don Dearborn in 2017 got him started on his honors thesis project. Here, Dearborn’s students head out to do fieldwork on Kent Island last May. (Don Dearborn)

Dr. Prothen has created what’s known as an individual-based model, also called an agent-based model, that seeks to in lung tissue regeneration. I thought about Don’s central question, how songbirds transport ticks, and how it might be more fruitful to look at the literature and then create a model of how those pieces play into the phenomenon as a whole, as opposed to a specific study of a specific bird species.

So I got the methodology from UVM and got the idea from Don and then combined those.

Tell us more about your individual-based model.

An individual-based model is an interesting way to answer questions about the natural world. It is based on the idea that behavioral patterns of an individual, or agent, can explain a wide, system-level dynamic.

My model depicts each bird as an individual. That meant I had to learn their behavior, so I went into the existing literature to find information; from that, I created the parameters for the model.

This animation of Ben Tonelli’s individual-based model shows how songbirds transport ticks southward during fall migration. The animation starts with 800 black dots, simulating the ovenbird species, in their northern breeding grounds. Their departure southward turns the black dots to blue. Certain dots pick up ticks and turn green. The attachment site of each tick is an orange dot, and the dropoff site, farther south, is red.

What are some of the parameters that you used?

For ticks, the parameters are pretty simple: Where they are in the U.S., the seasonal timing of their activity patterns, the rate they attach to birds, and how long they stay on.

Birds are way more in-depth. I used two different species, ovenbird and wood thrush, in the model; each forages on the ground, and researchers know a lot about them.

I had to know where they breed in the U.S. and Canada, how fast they can go, at what rate do they regain their energy stores when they stop, at what times do they start migrating, in what numbers are the initial populations, etc.  Anything that you can think of, because at the end of the day there are just a ton of parameters.

Did you have to learn any computer programs for your thesis?

Before last summer, I did not really know how to code. During the summer when I was working at UVM, I worked with CT scans and ended up learning how to code by learning , a platform for engineers, mostly bioengineers, but people use it for all types of things. I had to learn that to create my model for this thesis.

With �ֲ���ý now having a Digital and Computational Studies Program, students will be able to do research rooted in the natural life sciences but also have a computational end to it. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

How do you make what you write about accessible to all students, like me, who are not in STEM fields?

I’ve been motivated by the fact that this topic has an impact on human health; people have personal experiences with tick-borne diseases like Lyme.

So when writing I think about how I am going to explain it to my mom and my brother, and kind of orient it toward simple language when possible. At the end of the day, hopefully this will say something about effects on humans.

You’re also a religious studies major.

I wanted to major in religious studies because I think it is a great way to access the humanities, including history, cultural studies, and philosophy.

I also like how religious studies allows for the consideration of topics surrounding human suffering in a way distinct from the sciences.

In the Filene Room, Tonelli talks with Lewiston High School track athletes following a February 2017 screening of the documentary Freedom Runners, about an Israeli teacher who forms a running team for his students, young African refugees and asylum seekers. The screening was a collaboration between the Maine Jewish Film Festival and the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

How is your relationship with your adviser?

Don is an absolutely great adviser. Sometimes I get really stuck and am trying to think through how best to parameterize something in the model. I will explain it to him, and he will sit there for what seems like an uncomfortable amount of time while he thinks about it. Then he will give a really thought-out answer that will shift my thinking and really push me.

The biggest thing that Don has given me is the background in avian physiology and behavior. If I had an adviser who did not know so much about birds, the project would not have been possible because I had to learn a lot of these individual behaviors. My project is mostly self-directed, but he put the seeds in for places for me to start looking.

Tonelli competes at the NESCAC cross country championship meet on Oct. 10, 2017, at Pineland Farms.

What has been the most enjoyable part of your thesis?

I think just being self-directed and being able to pursue my question. Don’s huge background in all things avian means I can learn something totally new but also do it on my own time. That’s been really cool.

Do you have a favorite work spot on campus?

If I am coding, I work in Coram because the computer screens are huge so it is easy to have MATLAB and something else up. When I was doing the research I mostly did it in Commons upstairs, which is good because I could get plenty of coffee. I usually try to work there in the mornings because it is very quiet.

Any favorite snacks that you like to have while you are working?

If I’m working in the morning, I go upstairs in Commons and pound back breakfast in the first 10 minutes because I don’t want to get my computer all gross. Then I will just drink a ton of tea and coffee.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Find something that you are really interested in and then from there, try to think through a research question that you can answer during your time doing thesis.

Think about that early because I think that a lot of people who have the most success start doing stuff over the summer.

As part of his honors thesis, Nate Stephenson ’18 of Ellsworth, Maine, plays Everyman, a character from Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 short story “Diary of a Madman.” Senior Lecturer in Theater Katalin Vecsey adapted the play () so that it’s set in the present day.

Everyman could be any one of us, Stephenson says. “But he’s still one person. So you have to find how to play one person who can be anyone.”