Boston College

Eleven hundred and eighty-four students, faculty, and staff participated in the 12-hour Relay for Life, held at the Flynn Recreation complex on the night of February 13. Starting at 6 p.m., members from each of 86 teams continuously walked or ran around the track to raise funds and awareness for the American Cancer Society. A 3 a.m. hula-hoop competition, an ice cream eating contest, and entertainment by a variety of University music and dance groups boosted spirits throughout the night. The relay concluded at 6 a.m. on February 14, having raised more than $110,000 from corporate and individual sponsors.

Every 48 years, a species of bamboo in northeast India called “muli bamboo” flowers, and the subsequent fruits, which are roughly the size of a pear, fuel “a plague of black rats that spring from nowhere to spread destruction and famine in their wake.” Jeremy Zipple, SJ, traveled to the Indian state of Mizoram in 2008 to capture “this massive rat population explosion in the kind of vivid detail not possible in 1959, when the last invasion occurred.” The resulting documentary, “Rat Attack,” a NOVA/National Geographic Television program coproduced by Zipple, is being aired this week on public television stations.

Zipple was a Presidential Scholar at Boston College, majoring in economics and music. After graduating, he taught mathematics and music in a junior high school, served as a high school minister, performed classical and gospel music on the piano, served as co-director of a contemporary liturgical choir, and studied philosophy at Fordham University. In 2002 he entered the Jesuits.

Zipple made his first film as a high school student in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It explored race relations in his hometown, and took top prize in the 1995 Sony/American Film Instititute Visions of the U.S. young filmmakers festival. After college he owned a video production company that served clients from nonprofit organizations to Coca Cola. He coproduced and directed a feature-length documentary in 2006—Xavier: Missionary and Saint, which was narrated by Liam Neeson and released by Janson Media. For the last three years Zipple has been a producer at National Geographic Television, and currently he is developing an ethnographic documentary series on wisdom in traditional cultures.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Committee annually recognizes a Boston College junior “who reflects King’s philosophy in his or her life and work.” The award, which started in 1982, provides 75 percent of senior year tuition. At the committee’s Awards Banquet in Lyons Hall on February 11, President William P. Leahy, SJ, announced Gerrell Olivier ’10 as this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar. “It’s a great honor to receive an award associated with such an important American hero—a world hero,” said Olivier, who grew up in Randolph, Massachusetts, and is pictured above with his parents Elizabeth and Ludolph Olivier. A Carroll School of Management Honors Program student, Olivier is director of the AHANA Leadership Council Volunteer Corps and copresident of the AHANA Management Academy. For three years he has traveled to the hurricane-ravaged community of Turkey Creek, Mississippi, to help with reconstruction. He has also served in the Dominican Republic with Mustard Seed Communities, a faith-based, social service program, and he works with homeless children in programs run by the Boston public schools.

Fears of a connection between measles-mumps-rubella vaccinations and autism are not supported by research, Dr. Alfred DeMaria told a February 9 gathering of nursing school graduate students and faculty. DeMaria, director of communicable disease control at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, was the guest speaker at the February 9 Connell School of Nursing PhD Colloquium—one in a series of six public programs on nursing and public health presented this year. He stressed the long history of vaccines’ success in combating communicable diseases, and discussed strategies for allaying current concerns about safety. “There was a lively question-and-answer session with Dr. DeMaria,” said nursing doctoral student and adjunct clinical faculty member Heidi Fantasia, pictured above with Dr. DeMaria in the Murray Function Room. “How should we pay for vaccinations? How can we encourage more families to vaccinate their children? These are significant public policy questions for nursing professionals.”

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston January 19, 1809, and the University observed his bicentennial in mid January with a two-day celebration, “The Raven Returns to Boston,” which featured lectures, an O’Neill Library exhibition, the screening of a new biopic, and public readings. In truth, Poe had little regard for his native city, calling its residents “Frogpondians,” and writing that he was “heartily ashamed” of the place. The city’s literary elite responded in kind. Critics panned his reading at the Boston Lyceum, and Emerson called him the “jingle man.”

“It’s time to forgive and forget,” according to English Professor Paul Lewis. “Poe was our first great critic,” he wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed piece. “He ranged across genres, created the modern detective story, and greatly enriched what the gothic could achieve.” Lewis, assisted by graduate student Katherine Kim and a group of faculty, administrators, and students, organized a program to “seize this once-in-a-century opportunity to celebrate Boston’s most influential writer.” On the English department’s Poe Bicentennial website they declare their intention to convince the city to recognize Poe’s importance and “to start a wave of Poe appreciation and have heaps of fun in the process!”

Braving bitter cold temperatures, some 200 people came to Devlin 008 January 15 for an evening that included talks by authors Scott Peeples and Matthew Pearl, and the reading by Boston poet laureate Sam Cornish of an official city proclamation declaring January Edgar Allan Poe Month and naming the intersection of Charles and Boylston Streets Edgar Allan Poe Square. The assembled group sang “Happy Birthday” and enjoyed a coffin-shaped birthday cake decorated with a (dark chocolate) raven. @BC presents video highlights of student readings and performances from the celebration.