Author: Ann Sierks Smith

Jeremiah and Lamentations Through 16th-Century Eyes

Hope College church historian Dr. Jeff Tyler has spent the past 10 years in conversation with Reformation writers. As the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation approached, he combed through books, lectures, sermons and other texts by nearly 50 Reformation thinkers to assemble an anthology of Protestant Reformers’ comments on the Old Testament books of… Continue Reading →

Opening Research Doors for College Students Worldwide

On a spring Thursday morning, climb the stairs to the Schaap Science Center biochemistry lab and you’ll find a dozen detectives at work. Each pair of student researchers is analyzing a protein that scientists don’t yet understand. Interpreting 3-D images, culturing bacteria and using gel electrophoresis to assess the size and behavior of particles, they… Continue Reading →

College Access as a Health Policy Issue

If college attendance can lead to better health, is access to higher education a healthcare policy issue? That question is at the heart of research that Dr. Temple Smith began in 2017. Drawing from a federal study on adolescent health, she is investigating what influences college students’ physical and mental health, compared to young adults… Continue Reading →

Helping Oncologists Choose a Medicine That Will Work

When mixing a drug cocktail to treat cancer, the more information an oncologist has, the better. As part of an army of cancer researchers inching toward a cure one complicated detail at a time, Dr. Maria Burnatowska-Hledin has zeroed in on a gene that she hopes can help doctors assess whether a particular drug will… Continue Reading →

Bad News Travels … Slowly

If you’ve ever put off telling your boss that a project’s running late, you’ve got company. Over and over in his controlled experimental studies, Dr. Jayson Dibble finds the same pattern: If a person has bad news to deliver, it’s going to take some time. He’s heard of doctors waiting years to convey a diagnosis… Continue Reading →

What Alternative High Schools Are Getting Right

Flexibility. Low student-teacher ratios. Valuing relationships more than attendance. Dr. Laura Pardo is finding that successful alternative high schools have these features, among others, in common. She wants to equip aspiring teachers to replicate their impact in traditional schools, too. “There are some things that we can pull from, as a profession, that can help… Continue Reading →

20 Years of Building Community

Caryn Dannah pulled up to Scott Hall last fall ready to launch into something really new. Not only was she moving away from home for the first time — she’d opted into a living situation unlike anything that she’d experienced growing up in Grand Rapids. As a Phelps Scholar, Caryn “does life” with 95 other… Continue Reading →

Bringing Fresh Vision to a Classic

Before the swirling coats were contemplated, before he resolved how 18 roiling bodies would storm across a stage without colliding, before his reimagined storyline took shape, Professor Matthew Farmer spent a year filling his head with Igor Stravinsky. In his car, on his phone in the breaks between classes and appointments and choreographing other pieces,… Continue Reading →

Capturing the Intangible

Lisa Walcott can’t recall just what the item was. A blouse, perhaps? But she can picture the open drawer and the garment tossed across it. She was struck by the fabric’s fluidity — how much, draped there, it looked like liquid. But why would water trickle down the front of a bureau drawer? Why, indeed?… Continue Reading →

“Reinventing” Student Teaching with Mentoring at Its Core

Conceptually, the changes Professor Nancy Cook and Dr. Susan Brondyk engineered in Hope College’s student teaching model seem straightforward: More mentoring. More teamwork. A new tool to guide student teachers and seasoned professionals in a collaborative process of goal-setting, strategizing and regular assessment of each student teacher’s growth. But leading organizational change is anything but… Continue Reading →

Imaging What Can’t Be Seen

There’s a paradox in Leekyung Kang’s art: She focuses on things we cannot see. Opaque holes hover in some recent work. What do murky swaths of spray paint cover up? We see a brick foundation, but of what? Kang finds unseen spaces intriguing. It dates to her childhood in Seoul, South Korea. From her apartment… Continue Reading →

Ideas and the Test of Time

Tracing and analyzing how texts have been interpreted over time is Dr. David DeJong’s niche in biblical studies. The relatively new field is called “reception history” — reception meaning how a text was “received” by those who heard it or, in later eras, read it. What public discourse took place? What nuanced understanding developed? How… Continue Reading →

To Foster a Healthy Mindset and Body Image, Offset Negative Messages

There’s nothing like filtered TikToks and photoshopped celebrity images to make us dissatisfied with our own bodies. And boy, does modern media deliver a constant barrage. Dr. Mary Inman, professor of psychology and department chair, knows that affirmation is a powerful antidote. In multiple strands of research with colleagues and Hope College students, she’s identifying… Continue Reading →