Boston College

As part of the athletics department’s community outreach effort, members of the Boston College sailing team make monthly visits to the community center of the Commonwealth Tenants Association in Brighton, where they assemble some 250 bags of groceries for delivery to needy Boston families. Eighteen sailors volunteered on February 24, including (holding boxes of juice at left and right) Kelly Roy ’13 and Christian Manchester ’10. Since September, the field hockey, softball, women’s ice hockey, and baseball teams have also participated in the 12-year-old project, which is called Food for Families. All 31 athletic teams engage in one or more service programs.

The sailing team enters 2010 ranked first in the nation, having claimed the women’s singlehanded national championship and the sloop national championship in 2009, as well as the team racing national title. In January, three members—Annie Haeger ’12, Briana Provancha ’11, and Adam Roberts ’10—were named to U.S. Sailing’s Olympic development team.

An audience of more than a hundred students, faculty, and staff gathered in the Corcoran Commons Heights Room on February 22 to hear a panel discussion on relations between Israel and the United States. Speaking were, from left, Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the nonprofit American Task Force on Palestine, which supports a two-state solution for the region; Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University; and Aaron David Miller (at rear), a former state department analyst and negotiator, now a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The event was sponsored by the University’s Arab Students Association, the Boston College Coalition for Israel, the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the department of political science. Other sponsors included the Jewish studies program, Hillel of Boston College, the Islamic civilizations and societies program, the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Student Association, and Al-Noor, the University’s undergraduate journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.

As part of a semester-long residency provided by the Monan Professorship in Theater Arts, director Carmel O’Reilly is staging Translations, Brian Friel’s three-act play about the British effort to anglicize Irish place names in the 1830s. The Monan professorship, which was inaugurated in 2007, brings distinguished theater professionals to Boston College to teach classes and work with student actors, directors, and stage crews. O’Reilly, who recently directed Trojan Barbie at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and Dead Man’s Cell Phone at the Lyric Stage Company in Boston, is the founder and artistic director of Boston’s Súgán Theatre Company, which stages contemporary Irish and Celtic plays. In addition to leading workshops on acting and directing in the theater department, she will lecture on Irish drama in the Irish Studies program.

At a dress rehearsal of Translations on February 16 in the Bonn Studio are, from left, Peter White ’10, Alexandra Dirrane ’10 (back to camera), Seth Byrum ’11, Bryan Bernfeld ’11, and Zachary Desmond ’12. The show runs through February 21.

Every February, some 30 local high school girls with a scientific bent spend their Saturdays participating in Boston College’s Women in Science and Technology program—listening to lectures, engaging in lab experiments, and taking field trips to area research facilities. Started in 2006 by then-senior Liz O’Day (now a graduate student in chemical biology at Harvard), the program is taught and managed by undergraduates. Funding for supplies, travel, and lunches comes from the Arts and Sciences dean’s office and the office of the provost. According to Janine Sanderman ’10, organizer, with Courtney McKee ’11, of this year’s curriculum, the high school students “come in fearful about the work; at the end they’re eagerly explaining the experiments to their parents.”

Above, testing the acidity and tar levels of cigarette smoke on February 13 in the Merkert Chemistry Center with students from North Cambridge Catholic High School, are Laura Barrett ’11 (left) and Jacqueline Valenza ’12 (right).

A Boston College Minute: Along the sidelines, Conte Forum, February 6, 2010—Boston College vs. Duke

The unranked Eagles hosted the 10th-ranked Blue Devils. For Baldwin, it was game on.

A sampling of the 41 new, tenure-track faculty who arrived at Boston College for the 2009–10 academic year.

An evolving student art exhibition opened January 27 on the first floor of O’Neill Library in a large alcove newly designated the Level One Gallery. Called The Living Wall: A Public Sketchbook, the show offers wall space to any form of student expression—from penciled cartoon to poetry to oil on canvas—that can be contained on the expansive cork panels lining the area. The ever-changing display, which runs through February 24, was conceived by, and is moderated by, the undergraduate Boston College Art Club. Margaret Mansfield ’11, club president, seen above at the Living Wall opening with Matthew Swaim ’12, says members envisioned the exhibition as a three-dimensional blog, with art coming from across the student body and pieces premiering throughout the month of the show. According to University librarian Thomas Wall, the new gallery space reflects an effort to make the library the “center of academic life today. . . .a place of collaboration, exploration, of being seen and seeing.” A more formal student gallery housed at the Bapst Art Library will present a new show on March 18.

Beckman scholars from five New England colleges and universities—Boston College, Boston University, Smith College, Wellesley College, and Yale University—assembled in the Merkert Chemistry Center on January 23 to discuss their research projects in the fields of biochemistry, chemistry, and the biological and medical sciences. The scholarship program, which is funded by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, supports research by undergraduates—71 from 40 institutions at present—who work with a faculty mentor full-time during two summers and part-time during the intervening academic year.

The 15 students meeting at Boston College, including the University’s four current Beckman scholars, discussed topics ranging from the “Role of myosin II in cytokinetic contractile ring formation in fission yeast” to “Identifying mechanisms for polymeric degradation by endophytic fungi.” Above, reviewing a poster presentation in the Merkert foyer are, from left, Courtney McKee ’11 (“Studies on the nuclear localization of E7 protein of low risk papillomavirus type ll”), Julie Olson of Smith College (“Development of a tandem Diels-Alder/Pauson-Khand strategy for the synthesis of tetracycles”), and Stephen Bohlman ’11 (“The development of an asymmetric Kharasch addition reaction”).

The idea for the regional meeting came from professor of chemistry David McFadden and was sponsored by the biology and chemistry departments.

Journalist Bill Forry ’95 has covered the Boston area’s sizeable Haitian community since graduating from college—initially for the Dorchester Reporter, which his parents founded, then, beginning in 2001, for the offshoot Boston Haitian Reporter, of which he is managing editor. His wife, state legislator Linda Dorcena Forry ’96, is the daughter of Haitian immigrants and still has family on the island.

On January 15, @BC spoke with Mr. Forry about his experiences in the three days since a 7.0 magnitude earthquake leveled the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The interview took place at Forry’s newspaper offices in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood and also two floors up in the same building, at the temporary quarters of the Haitian Crisis Referral and Support Center opened January 14 by city officials with private assistance.

At the January 19 meeting of the Council of Undergraduate Journal Editors, staff members from three of the University’s undergraduate, peer-reviewed journals—Al-Noor, a publication focused on the Middle East and Islam; Elements, a forum for student research across disciplines; and The Laughing Medusa, a women’s literary and arts magazine—conferred on topics of common concern (budgets, IT systems, distribution methods, the need for an editorial style manual). Also discussed were areas of possible collaboration, including joint sponsorship of a conference later this year of New England undergraduate journal editors. The council, which was formed in 2008, meets monthly and also includes editors from Dialogue, a journal of student essays, and the bioethics publication Ethos. Clockwise from bottom left: Erin Eighan ’10, Alex Guittard ’11, Michael Weston-Murphy ’10, Amy Keresztes ’10, Madeline McSherry ’11, Donald Hafner, vice-provost for undergraduate academic affairs, Brian Varian ’11, Brian Tracz ’12, and Christopher Sheridan ’12.

On January 8, the Boston College men’s hockey team played rival Boston University at Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, in front of 38,472 fans (who were serenaded before the game by the Boston College Band, which played the familiar 8th-inning tune, “Sweet Caroline”). It was the teams’ second meeting of the season—in December the Eagles defeated the defending national champion Terriers 4–1 at BU’s Agganis Arena—and their 248th contest overall. With snow falling and the temperature at 21 degrees Fahrenheit, the Eagles, national champions in 2008, fell behind 3–0 before mounting a comeback and pulling within a goal. Boston College had 13 shots in the third period, but the Eagles ultimately lost by a score of 3–2. Above, sporting special gold sweaters with a Fenway-green stripe and a baseball diamond above the numbers on the back, are, from left, team captain Matt Price ’10, assistant captain Matt Lombardi ’10, Malcolm Lyles ’12, and Paul Carey ’12.

With more than $1.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the University (in the form of a matching grant), the chemistry department’s Center for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) recently installed four state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers and allied computing equipment for use in biomolecular and organic chemistry. The spectrometers analyze reflected electromagnetic energy to create images of chemical compounds, allowing researchers to identify and study molecules’ composition, structure, and dynamics. The six- to eight-foot tall devices, designed by Varian, are composed of an interior thermos-like container holding superconducting magnetic coils submerged in liquid helium (-452 degrees Fahrenheit) surrounded by a second thermos filled with liquid nitrogen (-320 degrees Fahrenheit). The frigid environment is necessary to produce superconductivity in the magnets. In the Merkert Chemistry Center facility on January 4 were, from left, the NMR center’s director, John Boylan, and Ph.D. chemistry students Jamie O’Brien, Laura Brozek, and David Moebius ’04.

In 1963, William Richardson, SJ, wrote Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, a book that turned a radically new light on one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. Until then, Martin Heidegger was invariably understood as an existentialist, someone concerned strictly with such matters of human existence as authenticity and anxiety. Afterward, Heidegger became known as a philosopher of being as a whole. Since 1981, Richardson has taught at Boston College. Now, several of his former doctoral students—Edward McGushin, Ph.D. ’02, Paul Bruno ’89, Ph.D. ’99, and Scott Campbell, Ph.D. ’99, all of whom teach philosophy at the college level—are turning lights on him: producing a documentary about the Jesuit and his remarkable philosophical life.

On October 8, a camera crew came to St. Mary’s Hall to film a dinner conversation among Richardson and three eminent philosopher-friends: Boston College’s Richard Kearney and Jeffrey Bloechl, and Stanford University’s Thomas Sheehan. The philosophers spoke of many things, including a crisis of faith that Richardson experienced late one night in Freiburg, Germany; his chancy, four-hour meeting with Heidegger at the thinker’s home in that city, 50 years ago; and the Jesuit’s return, with Kearney, to his ancestral home in a Protestant stronghold of Northern Ireland in 1972. @BC offers video clips from that dinner: