Tag: Spera

Michigan has the sixth-most reported cases of human trafficking in the United States. Dr. Llena Chavis is teaching people on the front lines how to recognize the signs of trafficking — and how to intervene. In 2016, when one of her students was doing research about trafficking, Chavis and the student learned that health professionals… Continue Reading →

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 →

If you’ve gone backpacking, you may be familiar with Sawyer point-of-use water filters — small, easy-to-use devices that allow outdoor enthusiasts to drink water safely from streams and other natural sources. But how well do they work, really? And not just in the United States, where their use is primarily recreational, but in countries where… Continue Reading →

Sandy Hook. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The Capital Gazette newspaper. The Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. The First Baptist Church of Sutherland, Texas. The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The roll call and the death toll keep rising, steadily and seemingly unchecked, and random mass shootings are… Continue Reading →

About 2 percent of a person’s body weight is mostly responsible for the way the other 98 percent of it functions. The complex human brain, which usually weighs in at about three pounds, is the ultimate multi-tasker of human organs — processor of senses, memory and knowledge; coordinator of heartbeats, breaths and motor skills; releaser… Continue Reading →

How does a swimmer’s degree of balance outside the pool correlate to faster race times in backstroke and freestyle? When copper or cobalt is added to a nickel-based Prussian blue analogue film, what happens to its ability to store charge? What do In-Group/Out-Group theory and analysis of speeches reveal about whether both sides in the… Continue Reading →

Of course college students feel stress. Grades. Tuition. Peer pressure. Choosing the right table at Phelps Dining Hall. But what about college faculty? How does the pressure they feel at work compare to their corporate counterparts? Those are some questions Dr. Marcus Fila is examining in the latest of his studies on workplace stress, and… Continue Reading →

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 →

Your “inscape” is in need of a total overhaul. You could start by throwing out your TV. That’s the rather iconoclastic view of Dr. Joseph LaPorte, whose particular focus is philosophy of biology and language. He contends that our “inscapes” — a term he borrows loosely from Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins — are on… Continue Reading →

After a deeply personal experience with grief, poet Dr. Susanna Childress turned to a new-for-her form of writing — one that requires vulnerability, trust and creative risk-taking, both personally and professionally. Her new collection of essays, Extremely Yours: Observations on Being Disordered, will be published by Awst Press, with an anticipated release in 2020.“I think… Continue Reading →

“Why did this have to happen to me?Where is God?How could God let this occur?What am I going to do?Who am I going to be?” Those massive life questions — uneasy, uncomfortable, overwhelming — are smack dab at the heart of Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren’s prolific research and writing. The scholar of experimental social psychology… Continue Reading →

Relating compassionately to students and teaching them effectively: Those are easy to recognize as meaningful expressions of a college professor’s personal faith. It can be trickier, though, to find purpose and value in one’s research. Hope College’s Continuum Scholars Faculty Development Program invites young faculty into conversations about how to integrate their vocation and their… Continue Reading →

Getting a good night’s rest isn’t always as easy as counting sheep. We might need to rethink our diets, too. Dr. Andrew Gall has investigated whether a high-fat diet may play a role in irregular sleep patterns, and based on lab results, he thinks the answer may be yes. This 2018 research was part of… Continue Reading →

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 →