Dear BB Community, Happy Fall 2024. I am pleased to welcome back Afua Nyarko and Dave Hendrix from their sabbaticals. I also welcome the incoming graduate class, and the incoming undergraduate class - all 161 of them!
I hope the beginning of the year has been good to all of you. It has been especially tough for me and my family. I appreciate your words of sympathy and thank you to those who stepped up to cover for me and who sent condolences and for giving me grace and time to adjust to this loss. Between my dad’s passing and the invasion of Lebanon and destruction of Beirut, the past month has been quite challenging.
I have spent considerable time reflecting on my father’s life and his success, impact, and bravery in starting out in multiple different countries and cultures and persisting despite adversities. I recognize that I learned a lot from him about the value of hard work. My father was a teacher and administrator, and as he liked to say, “a different kind of teacher, first to teach from heart to heart, then to teach with compassion, on a friend-to-friend basis”. Teaching was his mission and passion. His joy in giving, his optimism, and his always being someone you can count on never wavered.
My father has been my role model, in his positive energy, always seeing the good in people, and always remembering only the good things, and never taking no for an answer. More than ever, we need people like him to respond enthusiastically to any task, whether academic, administrative, or practical, to rise above political differences, and to care about people first. I will miss him dearly.
I am looking forward to a successful fall quarter, and hopefully to receiving funding for some of the many proposals that we all submitted this summer. We will take a break from hiring new faculty this year, and instead we will focus on strengthening the current faculty by investing in department facilities, fundraising for new equipment, and making the available space more efficiently used. We will also be revamping the Biophysics series, introducing an online lab (developed by Nate) and creating an ecampus major.
In this election year it is imperative that we vote to elect a president who embodies our values in respecting our diversity, who does not exploit people’s fears of immigrants, and who will work to negotiate a peaceful solution in the middle east and the rest of the world.
Below I list some of our activities and successes this past summer compiled by Kimberly. Enjoy reading.
