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Lansing Prescott, Chair of Biology | |
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Lansing Prescott, Chair of Biology
This was a particularly busy year for the Department; so much was going on that I am not sure where to begin and what to include. Because so many personnel changes are occurring, I will begin with the staff. Although Larry Tieszen has been at EROS Data Center full-time for the past two years, his retirement was not official until this Spring. Larry's replacement, Dr. Steve Matzner, was hired last year, but didn't finish his postdoc and arrive on campus until January. Thus the spring semester was his first. He taught Plant Function and Structure and helped out with Principles II (Biol. 121). Some of you will be interested to know that Steve will teach a new course in terrestrial plant ecology rather than Environmental Physiology (Larry';s old course). Dr. Ann Vogelmann has been helping us out, particularly at the Freshman level, for the past several years. A few weeks ago, she was offered a position at the new Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls. She will be in the science education program. We are sorry to see her go, but happy for her new opportunities.
As was the case last year, we spent considerable time and effort on a search for a new staff member. It turned out to be quite difficult to find a person qualified to teach both biochemistry and microbiology. I am happy to report that we have hired Dr. Nola Bormann as my replacement. Dr. Bormann is another Augie grad; we now have three alums on our staff: Lee Johnson (1959), Steve Matzner (1990), and Nola Huisman Bormann (1987). There certainly is precedent for this. If memory serves, Bonnie Bradfield Frazelle (1967), Carolyn Thiessen (1963), and Larry Tieszen (1961) are alums who also have been faculty members. In any case, Nola received her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Minnesota, has taught for a couple years as a leave replacement, and is now at R & D Systems in Minneapolis. Thus she will bring both industrial and teaching experience to the position.
All these staff changes have required changes in departmental responsibilities. For years, I have been the Chief Health Affairs Officer of the College. Next year, Deb Carlson will assume that role. I have been busy transferring mountains of material to her office; it is beginning to look like a storage room. Because I have been chair of the Department the last two years, the Dean has had to select a new chair. Maureen Diggins has kindly consented to become chair.
Many other things happened as well. Remodeling of the basement research complex continues. We completed an extensive program review for the administration. Val Olness was promoted to Associate Professor. The department faculty received eleven new grants this year! It was an amazing performance. I would like to thank Deb Carlson, Maureen Diggins, Lee Johnson, Val Olness, Craig Spencer, and Mike Wanous for all their hard work and congratulate them on their success.
Once again, you folks have been most generous with your gifts to the Department. I want to thank you collectively for your support. Two examples come to mind. For the second year in a row, Doug Bell made a substantial contribution to support Biology majors in our undergraduate research program. Both we and the students are grateful. Many, many of you contributed to the gift fund in connection with my retirement. I was truly touched by your thoughtfulness and generosity. Our program is changing rapidly these days, and the gift money is essential in purchasing new equipment items.
Speaking of the future, preliminary plans are being made to remodel GSC and add a large extension to the building. We are very excited and have already had several planning meetings. With luck, Biology Department facilities will look larger and much different in the future. We are so crowded that this project will make a truly major difference.
Well, that about does it for the Chairman's portion of the newsletter. I wish to finish with some personal comments. As I mentioned last year, Linda and I (along with our bassets Max and Sophie) will be leaving on June 11 for Texas. We will be settling on the edge of the Texas hill country just north of Austin - no more winters. Our new address is 295 Trail of the Flowers, Georgetown, Texas 78628. Our phone number is (512) 868-9324; I don't have a new e-mail address yet, but you can use the old one and I will check it around once a week. Cheryl will have my new e-mail address when I get one. I plan to keep busy. Work on the 5th edition of Microbiology will begin in September. I will use the remaining time for activities such as volunteer work, reading, golf, and chess. Don't really think there will be a problem keeping occupied!
Finally, thanks much for the dinner and the many cards, e-mails and gifts. I had a great time at the dinner and it was nice seeing a lot of people again after so many years. All the letters, cards, and e-mails were greatly appreciated. The whole stack is going with me to Texas. I want to let you folks know that the best part of this job has been the students!! I have genuinely enjoyed knowing all of you and following your activities and successes. Please keep me up on your doings.
I've been writing annual departmental newsletter paragraphs for lots of years now. For many of those years, the paragraphs submitted by members of the department gave evidence of stability and little change in the department. That's not been the case for the last several years. This year saw the addition of two new staff members, Steve Matzner and Nola Bormann, and the official retirement of two others, Larry Tieszen and Lansing Prescott. I warmly welcome Steve and Nola and wish God's blessing for Larry and Lansing. If you visited the department and looked north out of the Gilbert Science Center, you would see another significant change. Your vision to the north would be blocked by the new social science building, the Madsen Center. There will be another change in the future that will directly affect the department - the college's administration has given us the go ahead to do initial study and planning for renovating and adding to the Gilbert Science Center. This project will become a reality after I retire but to be in on the planning and dreaming is exciting anyway.
Actually, my own life in the department hasn't changed all that much. My course responsibilities have remained pretty much unchanged except that, for the first time ever, I taught Biological Principles I in the spring. That's never been done before. As I write this paragraph in mid-June, I've been back a couple of weeks from teaching a three-week course in Field Ornithology at the Au Sable Environmental Institute in northern Michigan. As I've indicated in previous newsletter paragraphs, the Institute sponsors a variety of field biology courses in the context of Christian environmental stewardship. This summer I will have a new involvement with the Institute. The Institute is sponsoring four five-week long field biology courses in Kenya, East Africa. There will be seventeen students from various colleges in North America and eight students from Kenya. I will function as the North American director of the program and also will help teach a course in the Birds of East Africa. My research interests also continue to be pretty much the same. I am working on the control of exotic smooth bromegrass in remnants of tallgrass prairie and also continue to do some work in bird behavior and ecology. This past year I published a paper on some aspects of the breeding biology of Common Mergansers on a lake in Michigan.
My wife, Jan, completed another year teaching third graders at Calvin Christian School here in Sioux Falls and we both spend a lot of time with our five grandchildren, all of whom live in Sioux Falls.
As always, I wish the best for all of you and come see us sometime.
Hello Friends!
Another year has quickly passed. And there have been so many changes . . .
This year Sara Horner (2000) and Laura Springhetti (1999) completed the abnormal frog chromosome project. We have concluded that there is no correlation between chromosomal abnormalities and physical deformities in the Minnesota frogs. This summer Sara will be moving on to study the presence of an oncogenic (cancer-causing) virus in various tissues of infected frogs. Eric Klawiter (2000) will be continuing work on subcloning interesting (potentially oncogenic) viral DNA sequences. In the fall, Crystal Cunningham (2001), Travis Dierks (2001) and Jenny Reitz (2000) will be joining Sara and Eric. I expect these highly motivated young people will keep me on my toes. Keeping them in reagents will be a challenge since this summer I am postponing the preparation of a proposal to support my student research to coordinate the preparation of a larger, more comprehensive proposal to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We anticipate an HHMI request, in support of undergraduate research, faculty development, curriculum development and equipment acquisition, of about 1.5 million dollars. While I do not believe in praying for material things, please keep us in your thoughts and send me some creativity vectors.
Mike Wanous, Maureen Diggins and I have been busy spending money on nucleic acid analysis equipment (not quite as fun as going to the Mall). Most of the heavy work in Room 3 has been completed so this summer we will finish the transformation and install our equipment. We hope to have the research area fully operational by fall when the students return. Dr. Steve Matzner, an Augie alum and Larry Tieszen's replacement, joined us mid-year, and in August we will also be welcoming Dr. Nola Bormann, another Augie alum, as Lansing Prescott's replacement. I expect the research area on the lower level will be really hopping with independent study students (and not just with my runaway frogs)!
I am looking to the next academic year without Lansing with some trepidation. I will be assuming his role as the Health Affairs Officer for the College, so I may be contacting some of you established folks in the near future. If you have any suggestions or words of wisdom to pass along to the students (or myself!), please do not hesitate to do so. Augie will be losing a wealth of knowledge and experience when Lansing rides off into the sun (he cannot ride into the sunset by going due south). Let me just say that my feet are going to have to grow mighty fast to fill his boots! I have already been practicing the sigh and head-roll.
This is a stimulating time to be a young faculty member in the Biology department. The Division has begun to plan for a renovation of our beloved GSC, which will probably include an addition. The challenge is to construct a facility that will be dynamic and adaptable. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this! We will keep you informed of our progress.
On a more personal note, this summer Dan (my husband), Jack (my son, who is now seven years old!) and I will be heading west to visit the Tetons, Yellowstone and Glacier. Unfortunately, the Spencers heard about our trip and have arranged to pass us on the interstate. This will be our first time camping in the back country. I hope the only bears we see are far, far away...
Please keep up the visits and the email messages. I love to hear what is going on in your lives!
I am writing this note from Casper, Wyoming where the College National Finals Rodeo is being held this year. H.L.'s women's team is particularly good and is in 6th place in the nation. I have to spend each day this week hiking in the mountains and along the North Platte which in this area is a huge swollen river filled by recent snow melt high in the mountains. As I told my colleagues before leaving, it's a tough life, but somebody's got to do it.
This has been a momentous year for us - full of sad partings and new beginnings. On Thursday, June 10, we said good-bye to Lansing as he closed his office door for the last time. It was very difficult for all of us; but we are happy to know that he and Linda have a new home awaiting them, and Lansing has days filled with writing and golfing to which to look forward. We officially said good-bye to Larry too this year, although we had done that in a sense two years earlier when Larry took a leave of absence to assume a job at EROS Data Center coordinating international scientific programs. To have both Lansing and Larry officially retire this year leaves a mighty big hole in the department. Of course, when we contemplate great losses to the department, we note the really great loss this past year with the passing of Sven Froiland. Will such giants ever come our way again?
But now to happy thoughts. When I left my colleagues in the department last Friday, June 11, they were cleaning out and organizing and setting up new labs at a furious pace! Steve Matzner joined us this past January after earning a Ph.D. at U.C. Davis and doing a post doc at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell. Steve will handle plant physiology, plant ecology, and part of introductory biology. Nola Bormann (Ph.D., U. of Minn.) will join us this August and handle microbiology, biochemistry, and part of introductory biology. Steve, Nola, Mike, Deb, and I will have research labs downstairs filled with exciting work and enthusiastic undergrads. This in addition to the labs upstairs that Lee, Gil, and Craig have going strong. And not to forget - Val's science education experiments going on in the real world of the classroom!
Each member of the department will fill you in on his or her endeavors, so I will say just a bit about mine. On June 1, I became acting chair of the department, filling out the remainder of Lansing's term. On August 1, I will become the "real" chair for a three year term. It is a challenging task, but it is made easier by the really great group of faculty we have in place. In addition, we are blessed to have our two faculty associates, Julia Spiry and Libby King. Also an integral part of the department are our technicians, Mike Chapman and Joan Ashton. Finally, and helping to hold us all together, is the best secretary with whom anyone could ever be blessed, Cheryl Holzapfel. As is probably obvious, with a crew like this and over 200 biology majors, we are rapidly outgrowing our facilities. Therefore, one of our immediate tasks is to begin planning for a new wing on GSC, hopefully not more than about five years in the future.
With regard to my ongoing work with the fat yellow mice (which some of you have known intimately), we have some more work planned and new funding for that work. With my valued colleague, Nels Granholm of SDSU, we have funding from the Ethel Austin Martin Foundation for a continued look at the relationships among diet, obesity, and infertility in the expression of the lethal yellow gene.
So things are hopping here in the Biology Department of Augustana College and life goes on. We hope that this newsletter finds each of you well and happy and using the many talents God has given you to make this world a better place. Please keep in touch. We are always glad to hear from each of you and excited to see you. May you have a truly blessed 1999-2000.
It seems that I've written regarding someone leaving the Department every other year of late, and here's the current edition. As many of you know by now, Lansing Prescott has decided to take early retirement this year and escape Northern prairie winters forever by moving back to Texas. Lansing has made many contributions to this Department, not the least of which has been serving as department chair for ten of the thirty years that he has been here. That's a major feat, especially considering the unruly mob that he's been called upon to "lead." But Lansing is probably best remembered as a precise (to the quarter point!) and demanding teacher and as a patient advisor to generations of majors and pre-professional students. There are, however, other things that various ones of you will also remember well - resounding sighs, favorite repeated Prescottian sayings, seemingly endless glassware rinsing, Friday night Cell Bio. labs, tennis matches, mighty golf drives and dented houses, key-chain zips, "Flash," and, of course, the famous Farrah Fawcett fiasco. Seriously, though, Lansing's contribution here might be best exemplified by an incident that happened early this May. On the day after a very pleasant evening when a group of alumni and friends gathered to salute him, Lansing didn't simply bask in the afterglow, but trundled right off to help register members of next year's large and impressive entering class. Mind you, Lansing won't ever teach any of those students, but he continues to be deeply concerned with the past, present, and future of the Department and the College. For that and much more we are grateful, and we wish him the very best in the future.
I should mention briefly as well that J. D. Thompson is retiring from the Physics Department this year after 42 years of teaching. We will surely miss him around GSC. We have hired a very bright young person named John Larkin to succeed J. D. and we are very excited about John's potential. John did a great job of engaging our students during the time he visited us and he does very interesting research in optics working in the bio-medical area of photo-dynamic therapy. We think that he will interest a number of Physics students (and probably Biology students, as well) in doing research with him. I served on the search committee for that position and I can say that John was our clear first choice from around fifty applicants and we were delighted when he decided to accept our offer.
Biology Seminar speakers this year included several Departmental alums - Annette Vollan-Kerber, Larry Chase, and Lon Kightlinger. Also, Steve Matzner gave his inaugural seminar as a member of the Department and I was honored to give the O. M. Lofthus Lecture in October. Finally, Nola Bormann, an alum who will assume the Departmental position in Microbiology and Biochemistry, gave a recruitment seminar in December.
My teaching duties remained unchanged this past year, but I look forward to teaching in the non-majors course this Fall Semester for the first time in many years. My research has expanded to include a study of terrestrial isopod adaptations under an NSF grant received with colleagues in California and British Columbia, and an Augustana student, Jared Likness, is working with me on this project. Jared is a major from Britton, SD, who reminds me of so many of you who have studied and worked here over the years. He is modest and unassuming, but very bright, independent, and hard-working. It's wonderful that such great young people keep coming through this Department.
I'm out of space, but I do want to add that it's been especially great this past year to have visits with several alums from quite a few (!) years ago. Please write or e-mail when you have a moment to let us know about news in your lives, and please stop by when you get a chance. We'd surely like to talk with you about dreams and developing plans for renovation and expansion of GSC!
Greetings from a fellow alum and one of the latest additions (February 1, 1999) to a rapidly changing department. Both Larry Tieszen and Lansing Prescott officially retired this year. We still see Larry fairly regularly, but Lansing has moved to Texas. I am thankful I had the benefit of his advice for one semester. For those of you who don't know me, let me introduce myself. I grew up on a farm outside of Stickney, SD. I attended Augustana College (class of 1990) and intended to apply to medical schools but became interested in plant biology while taking Larry Tieszen's plant function and structure class. I applied to graduate schools and suddenly found myself in sunny California (UC Davis) where I worked on phosphorus and nitrogen uptake in Artemisia tridentata (sagebrush) under drought stress for my masters in Ecology. My Ph. D. work (also at UC Davis) was focused on population differences in water-relations traits in Quercus douglasii (blue oak). At Davis, I met my wife (Jetty Duffy-Matzner, now teaching in the chemistry department) while volunteering with a local Lutheran youth group and we were blessed with two sons (ages two and a half and four). We spent a year and five months in Ithaca, New York while I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research on Cornell University campus. We made the long trip to South Dakota in January with two kids, two dogs, a cat, and four orchids (with a slight delay in Chicago due to their worst blizzard in 20 years).
It has been a good learning experience this last semester, I taught plant function and structure and biology 121 (with Drs. Diggins-Hutcheson and Johnson). One big plus in being back at Augie is the quality of the students. You can't help but like these kids! I am looking forward to fall semester when I will teach biology 120 and a new class, terrestrial plant ecology. The new plant ecology class will combine aspects of natural history and local plant identification with some quantitative experiments and ecological theory. Next spring I will probably be teaching biology 121 and an environmental science course. My schedule this summer is quite busy. In addition to organizing my lab (that includes sorting through all of Larry's stuff) and preparing for fall classes, I received some ARAF (Augustana Research and Artist Fund) money to conduct some preliminary experiments. My research interests focus primarily on plant responses to water stress. My first project will be looking at how different environmental conditions affect water stress tolerance in pinto beans. Later this summer I will be presenting some of my work from the Boyce Thompson Inst. at the Ecological Society of America conference in Spokane WA.
It really is good to be back at Augustana and in the mid-west. After California and New York my wife is frequently surprised at how friendly everyone is here. The kids are happy to be close to grandpa and grandma and uncles and aunts. I am blessed to be in a department with a great group of colleagues, and a strong commitment to both teaching and research.
I have come to relish the Cliff Notes version of the annual science education update - so here is the 1999 rendition with apologies to the purists amongst you!!!
My quote to live by for 1999 is:
"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Unfortunately, I don't have a professor requiring that the paper be completed by the end of finals week each semester. Consequently, over the years I managed to accumulate a backlog of papers in my round tuit pile. Well, last year I spent part of my sabbatical chained to the computer and managed to wrap up five of these things. The topics ranged from water pollution and fish ecology in SD and Iowa to fire ecology in Glacier National Park. Students played an integral part of many of the projects. I am pleased that the papers include 5 Augie student co-authors, and that one of the journals put a photo of our study on the cover (Freshwater Ecology, June '98).
Now I am excitedly launching a new research endeavor in paleolimnology. I had dabbled a bit with this prior to coming to Augie, and am finally getting back to it. We will be analyzing lake sediments from Montana to document historical changes in water quality related to human activities, primarily timber harvest. We got a nice grant from the NSF to set up a radioisotope lab at Augie for dating the cores. Other facets of the project include analysis of stable carbon isotope ratios in the sediment cores to estimate historical changes in lake productivity, as well as remote sensing analysis to document land cover change in our study areas. Although the satellite data only goes back about 25 years; aerial photos may allow us to push back another 30 years or so. There are three Augie students currently working on this project.
This summer we have our work cut out for us as we travel via horseback and rubber raft to collect cores from Big Salmon Lake in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. This will be our "control" lake, as the surrounding lake basin has remained essentially free of human disturbance. I am looking forward to this adventure, and will report back at a later date.
Cheers
I have now completed my second year at Augustana College. It has been a great year. One thing that I have been thinking about is how to prepare our students for the professional world. For our students going into fields such as education, science, industry, business, and medicine, test-taking ability will be of minimal value. They will need to know how to communicate. So this spring I oriented my advanced class, Molecular Biology, to address this need. The students had a number of assignments in scientific writing. They also presented a 15 to 20 minute seminar on a topic in biotechnology that they had researched, projecting their slides from a computer. I was very impressed with what our students can do! This approach fits in with the saying of Augustana's president Ralph Wagoner that we "educate students, not just train them". Since last year's newsletter, two more grants have come in, for which I am thankful. One is from the USDA and the other is from the South Dakota Wheat Commission. Both fund my work on searching for genes that turn on expression of gluten genes in wheat. This year I have again had the privilege of working on research with a number of very talented students: Beth Hamann, Ellen Hamann, Jill Kruse, Christy Lamis, Erin Lee, Steve Moeckly, and Jesse Munkvold. Jill, Christy, Erin, and Jesse will be continuing their research with me over the summer, and Tom Opheim will also be starting a project.
As you know, Lansing Prescott is retiring this summer. It has been a great learning experience to teach with him in Cell Biology over the last two years. We will miss the many contributions he makes to the department but wish him well in his future endeavors. We are looking forward to getting to know the new microbiologist, Nola Bormann this fall. With all that is going on, it is a very exciting time in the department. I hope you have a great summer and fall.
Sven G. Froiland
During this past academic year, we lost Sven Froiland, a great founding father to the department and mentor to so many of our alums. Following is an excerpt from his obituary.
Sven Gordon Froiland was born May 4, 1922, in Astoria, SD. Following his graduation from Clear Lake High School, he received his Bachelor of Science degree from South Dakota State University in 1942. He received his Masters and Doctorate from the University of Colorado.
He attended the University of Minnesota in the summer of 1968 and was a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona in 1970-71. He spent summers attending National Science Foundation Institutes at the University of Michigan (1963) at the University of Indiana (1964) and at the University of North Carolina.
He and Marion Warner were married October 25, 1942, in Dawson, MN. He served in the infantry from 1942 to 1946 and attained the rank of Captain. He was wounded in the second wave of the invasion of Normandy and received the Purple Heart.
Dr. Froiland began his teaching career at Augustana in the fall of 1946 as a biology instructor. He moved through faculty ranks becoming a full professor in 1958. He served as chairman of the Biology Department for 17 years until 1970 and the Division of Natural Sciences for 20 years until 1976. He also served as director of the Center for Western Studies. He held other positions including Research Associate with the USDA Forest Service and Director of the Black Hills Natural Sciences Field Station.
We in the Biology Department miss Dr. Froiland sorely, but his guiding spirit will live on in us as we seek to help future generations of biology students.