Tag: Spera

We may have to check the nutrition label to know the amounts of saturated and unsaturated fats we’re consuming, but for our cells, this tallying is second nature. Scientists have known for years that cells absorb, process and use fats; that they can change saturated fats to unsaturated ones; and that they recognize the difference… Continue Reading →

From the outside peering in, a great deal of organic chemistry looks like salt and water: white powders and transparent liquids. Yet this branch of science is prolific in creating the things we use every day — toothbrushes, medications, milk jugs and other ubiquitous consumer products. The field has built these things so well, in… Continue Reading →

At Hope, the course Encounter with Cultures heightens teacher education candidates’ understanding of how ethnicity, culture and gender play out in day-to-day life. Later, when as teachers they relate to students whose lives can be radically different from their own, they draw on the critical thinking they learned about racism in America and the impact… Continue Reading →

On a table in his office in VanderWerf Hall, a popular recent memoir about hiking the Appalachian Trail sits alongside Dr. Brian Yurk’s mathematics papers and journals. The presence of each offers empirical evidence of how the applied mathematician’s love of nature is combined with his love for his work. He’s a backpacker, climber, skier,… Continue Reading →

Almost any instrument has the capacity to express a variety of musical genres: classical, jazz, folk, blues, Latin, pop. It’s a musician’s choices of style and repertoire that let the variation out. For instance, take the violin — or should we say fiddle? To differentiate them, don’t look; just give a good listen. At the… Continue Reading →

When Dr. Andrew Dell’Olio was a senior at Rutgers University, a professor there taught t’ai chi ch’uan in the campus square. Though Dell’Olio didn’t join in, he recalls observing the meditative martial art; he found it quite beautiful. Within a year, the budding philosophy professor, by then a graduate student at Columbia, had enrolled in… Continue Reading →

A pricked finger, a drop of blood, a glucose level readout. The routine is familiar to anyone with Type 2 diabetes, and a team of researchers at Hope is working to shake it up. Not the prick to the finger, but to the wallet. Over two months in mid-2019, Dr. Kenneth Brown noticed that the… Continue Reading →

“From the moment of birth the human person is becoming.” This first line of Dr. Angela Carpenter’s Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective sets up an interdisciplinary exploration of how we go about “becoming.” One essential element is moral formation, and it’s this aspect of the human experience that Carpenter focuses… Continue Reading →

When an elderly person falls, a cascade of medical problems may follow. So when a cluster of falls occurred in 2019 in the assisted living section of a West Michigan senior community, staff asked Hope’s Department of Kinesiology for advice. Dr. Maureen Dunn and Dr. Kirk Brumels teamed with physical therapist Dr. David Krombeen ’12… Continue Reading →

Converting one language into another isn’t just a utilitarian task; a good translator conveys the voice and linguistic nuances of the person whose words are being translated. But what if you are a 21st-century man translating the writings of a 17th-century woman? What challenges does a modern man encounter when decoding the thoughts and words… Continue Reading →

If you’re asked to imagine a “life-changing” app — go ahead, try it — do you flash back several summers to Pokémon Go, the sensation that pulled thousands outdoors to re-experience the world around them? Dr. Mike Jipping is proving that an app need not be flashy or viral to profoundly, positively alter lives. He’s… Continue Reading →

Well beyond the reach of unaided sight lies the genesis of energy we use every day to lift a cup of coffee, climb a mountain or twitch an eyelid. That is, we do when our cells are functioning properly. Many cases in which they’re not can be tied back to the specialized compartments in our… Continue Reading →

Jesus wept. And for seven centuries, a Benedictine abbey church in France claimed to have preserved the tear he shed. Dr. Anne Heath doesn’t challenge the belief that the Abbey of La Trinité (the Holy Trinity) in Vendôme once maintained and venerated a tear that Jesus cried at the tomb of Lazarus, as described in… Continue Reading →

In a Hope College engineering laboratory, a roomful of Roombas® — or more accurately, Kobuki mobile robots (shaped like the popular Roomba vacuums, but with no cleaning power) — are carrying on earthbound research that grew out of knowledge a professor acquired while working on other robots intended for space exploration. And if the work… Continue Reading →

An innovative Hope College initiative enabled 50 faculty members to travel internationally in teams over the past 18 months to interact with scholars in other nations about complex global problems. “The impact on faculty is just tremendous,” says Dr. Deirdre Johnston, interim associate dean for global education, who co-directed the Hope Portals to the World… Continue Reading →

Dr. Deb Sturtevant’s “on the side” takes her quite a distance. Guatemala. China. Romania. Zambia. Since the 1990s, she’s worked on projects with the global arm of Bethany Christian Services. In a six-year effort in Zambia that wrapped up in 2015, she and colleagues evaluated a community-based family support program and networked with a local… Continue Reading →

“My undergrad degree was in history; we focused a great deal on Indian history. My master’s was in African politics: the diaspora — the Indian people who had undergone British imperialism and therefore transferred their wages and their livelihood — living in Anglophone Africa. For my Ph.D., I wanted to pick a region of the… Continue Reading →

Finding the intersections between one’s faith and vocation needn’t be a solitary task. At a yearly conference sponsored by the Lilly Fellows Program in the Humanities and the Arts, faculty from Christian institutions work through nuanced issues together — each refining their personal sense of how their faith relates to their teaching, their scholarly work,… Continue Reading →