Patricia Pendry,
Psychology ’00

Patricia Pendry was always interested in child development, but never imagined she’d become a human development professor and researcher at a well-known university. There were significant challenges in getting there: the college degree she earned in her native Netherlands didn’t set her up well for making a career change or applying to American graduate schools, and Pendry was also working full-time and raising her children.

Pendry enrolled in an evening psychology class at SCS to see where it would take her, and soon she was hooked. “It confirmed that I love the field, and I decided to earn a new undergraduate degree,” she says. “I started taking more classes. I’d get the kids to bed by 7:30 and then hit the books.” But the real spark came for Pendry in a challenging class on personality theory and research taught by the late SCS instructor Scott Acton. “That’s when I was bitten by the research bug,” she recalls. “I realized I wanted to conduct my own research in an academic setting and that requires a PhD. Acton helped me realize I was capable and inspired me to pursue graduate school. It was a great loss when he died in an accident. I later dedicated my dissertation to him. He and other SCS instructors, like Eshkol Rafaeli and Michael Bailey, gave me a lot of encouragement — and flexibility, too.”

Thanks to her instructors’ support, as well as hard work and an attitude that “you get out what you put in,” Pendry earned her bachelor’s degree with a major in psychology in 2000 from SCS and went on to obtain a PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from The Graduate School at Northwestern in 2007. She was then offered an assistant professorship at Washington State University, and is currently teaching child and family development courses. She also conducts research on the effects of family functioning on child stress, health and behavior, as well as related interventions. Pendry’s most recent project, funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), is a clinical trial on the effects of equine (horse) facilitated learning on adolescent stress hormone functioning and social competence in children. “I love what I do, and my family loves it here in Washington,” she says. “SCS made a tremendous difference in my life.”

Janine Kirstein-Miles, biology and biochemistry instructor

Janine Kirstein-Miles, PhD, is fast emerging as an authority of aging. The globetrotting molecular biologist has presented her research in Austria, Croatia, Germany and Japan.

A recent coup: An invitation to discuss her work at an international symposium this spring at the University of Cambridge in England.

Science, notes Kirstein-Miles, 33, who also teaches biology and biochemistry in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is an international endeavor. Researchers “have in common a natural curiosity and share a passion to make sense of puzzling observations.”

The German-born scientist, a postdoctoral fellow at the Morimoto Laboratory on the Evanston campus, has spent the last four years here investigating the links between aging and neurodegenerative decline — “Why we age, what happens when we age, what we can do about it.”

“SCS students are highly motivated and I’m glad that I can contribute to their new careers. I often hear back from former students who are now in med school or have started graduate school.”

No prima donnas, her research models are casual about their cradle-to-grave documentation. Kirstein-Miles scrutinizes microscopic roundworms over the course of their three-week lifespan. She observed that damaged and malfunctional proteins build up over time, ultimately harming other proteins and enfeebling  “elderly” worms. She uses biomarkers to monitor the correct fold and function of proteins.

Basically, toxic proteins trap other proteins, depleting cells of their functions, Kirstein-Miles said. On a cellular level, “worm cells and human cells are almost the same,” she said. “We utilize the same genetic pathways for our metabolism or the way our cells communicate with each other to respond to internal or external stress conditions.” Her research could reshape the treatment of geriatric patients battling neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease.

Kirstein-Miles has been an instructor at SCS for three years. When she started, she just wanted teaching experience, “but this quickly changed to really enjoying the classroom,” she said. “SCS students are highly motivated and I’m glad that I can contribute to their new careers. I often hear back from former students who are now in med school or have started graduate school.”

Upon her return Stateside, Kirstein-Miles was soon packing her bags again, this time to present her findings during a six-day conference at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, a cornerstone of biological research. Her theories are worming their way into acceptance.

Mike Waller,
Leadership and Organizational Behavior ’12

Mike Waller always felt that he was just as intelligent as his peers. But studying was a challenge for him, while others seemed to sail through. “My entire life people have told me I ‘wasn’t trying’ or ‘didn’t have what it takes,’” he says. “I started believing them.” After struggling through high school, some community college, and a stint at University of Texas, he decided college wasn’t for him.

Waller joined the U.S. Coast Guard during the Gulf War, but didn’t feel intellectually challenged. After the military he worked as a residential construction manager, but he knew a bachelor’s degree was key to an executive position or to switching fields. He considered community college again, but his wife convinced him he could aim higher. She was right — Waller earned his bachelor of science degree in 2012 at SCS, majoring in Leadership and Organizational Behavior. The unique program combines a student cohort, interactive learning and flexible but intensive scheduling to help busy, high achieving professionals complete a degree in two years. “It’s a phenomenal program, which reminded me a little of boot camp,” says Waller. “With the cohort’s support, it’s very difficult to lag behind or drop out.”

Waller also received a referral to Northwestern’s Disability Services, where he was diagnosed with mild dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. “It changed my life — I finally had an answer for my challenges in school. I received medication, occupational therapy, and learning strategies.” Armed with these new tools, and real-world knowledge from his courses, Waller is starting his own real estate company and considering graduate study.

Joshua Hunter,
Mathematics ’12

Joshua Hunter has always excelled at mathematics. It’s one of the reasons he was accepted into college with a scholarship when he was just sixteen. But he left school before graduating, spending the next ten years on the East Coast bringing his native computer skills to software engineering and video game companies. Despite gaining a measure of professional success, Hunter knew a more promising future would mean thinking about his degree again. “In gaming, you don’t need a degree if you have the programming skills,” he says. “But I wanted to get into financial engineering, which is different — lack of a degree can be a real obstacle.”

Hunter returned to Chicago and landed a full-time position in a financial trading technologies firm. By attending SCS twice a week in the evenings, he completed a bachelor of science degree with honors, majoring in mathematics. “I had a good position that I was happy in, and I wasn’t going to quit just to go to school,” he says. “SCS has a high-quality program that places strong emphasis on quantitative skills. That’s paramount in the financial programming field.”

As Hunter “got deeper into the math” during his studies, the more interested he became in the subfield of computational finance. He applied and was accepted into the University of Chicago’s Master of Science in Financial Mathematics program. “My coursework at SCS and the work experience I was able to retain were key to my acceptance,” he says. “I’d like to explore developing quantitative trading solutions and other opportunities that are now available to me.”

Hope McCoy,
Psychology ’12

Hope McCoy was recently accepted into the University of California-Los Angeles’ top-ranked PhD program in Higher Education and Organizational change. But she vividly recalls how this path to a dream career in educational policy and research almost didn’t happen. She had initially entered a dual degree program at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences — classical piano and psychology — but had to work multiple jobs to cover tuition and expenses while meeting double requirements. She reluctantly left the program, but was determined to earn her degree.

“I was out of school for a few years. But taking one class at a time, SCS made it possible to return,” she says. “I also had the flexibility to look for a full-time, salaried position, instead of the lower-paying jobs I had as a day student. ”

McCoy began temping for several offices at Northwestern, and was later hired as Coordinator of Communications for the Kellogg School of Management. She adjusted her course load each quarter and watched her GPA skyrocket, eventually earning a bachelor of science degree in spring 2012. “My peers had moved on, but the important thing was to finish and do well,” she says. “I had a wide range of working professionals who I bonded with, and wonderful, accessible professors, like Dr. Gary Phillips. It was less competitive than the day program, but no less rigorous.”

The experience also sparked McCoy’s interest in non-traditional students. “In SCS I could customize an independent study, and I researched the dynamic between community colleges, for-profit education and nontraditional students,” she says.  “By the time I applied to graduate school, I already had a topic for my dissertation, and I understood how to prepare for a field that I’m passionate about.”

SCS students share research on transparency with City of Chicago

The current buzzword in government is transparency, with its implied ideal of openness and accountability. “‘Transparency’ has replaced the word ‘reform’ as the new mantra of Chicago politicians,” wrote SCS instructor Donald Gordon in an April op-ed in the Chicago Tribune.

But what is the reality of government efforts toward transparency? This past winter quarter, students enrolled in Gordon’s Political Research Seminar: Transparency in Chicago City Government, set out to answer that question by conducting research for Chicago’s Office of Inspector General (IGO). What they discovered opened their eyes — and caused Gordon to rethink his own views.

(From left to right) SCS instructor Donald Gordon and students from Political Research Seminar: Transparency in Chicago City Government, Karen Badawi, Brandon DeLallo, Matt Marcus

“If you’re teaching well, you learn from your students, and they’ll shape your views,” says Gordon, a longtime community activist and onetime aldermanic candidate in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. The author of a 2010 book on how citizens can participate more effectively in government, Gordon is currently at work on a second title, Transparency in Government: What It Is and Why It Matters.

“To achieve more transparency, I thought we needed to craft better FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] laws,” says Gordon. “Now I believe that as average citizens we’ve been hoodwinked into thinking we have to beg for information. There should be no need for FOIA laws — 95 percent of the information should simply be there.”

One of the students who influenced Gordon’s views is Matt Marcus, who says that Gordon’s teaching style promotes a lively exchange of ideas. “Professor Gordon’s combination of civic idealism and Chicago realpolitik brought a unique tone to the classroom,” says Marcus. “Mix in the practical experience we gained from working with the Inspector General’s Office and the result was a classroom experience that I’ll cherish as a capstone to my experience at Northwestern.”

The opportunity to work in the IGO came about after Inspector General Joseph Ferguson lectured in one of Gordon’s Northwestern classes in 2010. On its website, the IGO says that its mission is “to root out corruption, waste, and mismanagement, while promoting effectiveness and efficiency in City government” — an apt description of the thrust of Gordon’s own work.

“I suggested to Joe Ferguson that we put a course together that would allow students to conduct research for the IGO,” says Gordon. “Their office was short of staff, so it seemed like a perfect match.” Thus was born Political Science 395. The success of this year’s class has already placed it on next year’s academic calendar.

Translating that idea into an academic venture meant creating a classroom experience before students entered the IGO. Gordon selected texts and encouraged — in fact, insisted on — participation in discussion. “I wanted to make sure the class was more than a work experience in the IGO,” says Gordon. “I wanted them to develop an understanding of how government works.”

Before the students began their research, they made field trips to the IGO to meet Ferguson and his staff. A guest lecture by Aaron Feinstein, director of program and policy review at the IGO, helped further define the kinds of information the office wanted the students to research. Chicago Tribune reporter David Kidwell spoke to the class about his investigation of transparency efforts in Chicago government.

Working in teams, the students examined best practices by a range of government entities to see how other governments open up information to citizens. The teams uncovered some interesting leads. Phil Boardman, Peter Contos, and Bryan Weber held up as a model an open source design contest in Portland, Oregon, that created apps to address civic issues. Kaasha Benjamin, Alex Katz, Peter O’Neill, and Kyra Weiss gave the State of Nebraska’s budget transparency website high marks for allowing citizens to access information in a straightforward and easy-to-understand format.

Karen Badawi, Brandon DeLallo, and Matt Marcus, examined a website launched by the Ministry of Infrastructure in Ontario, Canada, that allows residents to see how projects are funded and track their progress. Greg Andrus, Shawn Mahoney, and Ethan Gillani looked to Iceland to discover how the Icelandic Constitutional Council used social media tools to engage citizens in the process of redrafting the national constitution.

In the spirit of transparency, the students’ research can be accessed through the IGO website at http://chicagoinspectorgeneral.org/major-initiatives/open-chicago/transparency-and-accountability-initiatives-of-other-governments.

The teams then researched specific city departments to determine how open each is about sharing information, looking at the Chicago Police Department; the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection; the Office of Budget and Management; the Department of Housing and Economic Development; and the Department of Public Health. Finally, the students wrote reports with recommendations on how to improve transparency within those departments and presented their findings to the IGO. “The idea was for the students to cut down the weeds so that the IGO staff can see what to look into,” says Gordon.

The IGO valued the weed-cutting. “The students in Professor Gordon’s class brought a fresh perspective to our transparency research,” says Inspector General Ferguson, “and their work is serving to help new staff in our office think about ways to improve our Open Chicago initiative.”

Two of the student teams — DeLallo, Badawi, and Marcus; and Boardman, Contos, and Weber — delivered oral presentations on their research on May 21 at Northwestern’s Undergraduate Research and Arts Exposition, an annual event that showcases the work done and discoveries made by undergraduates.

“The key takeaway from the course was for students to understand the real meaning of transparency in government,” says Gordon. “I wanted them to connect the dots, to see how transparency can have an impact on civic engagement and to see how civic engagement works toward mitigating corruption in government.”

“I love my job, and having the degree probably helped me get my last promotion, but that’s not why I went back to school. For me it was important to know that I’m a college graduate.” — Catherine Thomas (BS ’01), major in Environmental Studies

Catherine Thomas grew up in a small town in Montana and was studying ornamental horticulture at Montana State University when a summer internship lured her to the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, in 1991. “I thought the Chicago area would be an exciting place to live,” says Thomas, who discovered that her new workplace provided the ultimate excitement. Thomas stayed on at the garden, working her way up a trellis of increasingly challenging positions. Today she is the garden’s plant propagator, in charge of coaxing seeds and plants to reproduce and adapt to their environments.

“Once I realized I was going to stay here, I decided to complete my degree,” says Thomas. She took one or two classes at a time at SCS to accommodate full-time work and a personal life. “My marriage took place while I was at SCS, and my daughter was born the year I graduated,” says Thomas, who graduated in 2001 and now has two children. “When you’re working and going to school, you learn to prioritize.”

At SCS Thomas took elective courses in subjects such as music and English literature, and she discovered a range of disciplines rolled into her chosen major in environmental studies. “We looked at how philosophy, sociology, geography and geology relate to the environment,” says Thomas. The knowledge she gained has helped her in her work, says Thomas: “We may need to treat seeds before they’ll grow, giving cold treatments to prairie plants or acid treatments to seeds that might pass through a bird’s stomach. We look to nature.”

Luke Fidler, Undergraduate Research Grant recipient

For the second year in a row, an undergraduate from the School of Continuing Studies has landed a prestigious Undergraduate Research Grant, sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Northwestern University.

With the aid of the grant, junior Luke Fidler, an art history major, traveled to Paris in December to conduct research for his project, “Place, Space, and Mortality: The Pervasiveness of Death in the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis.”

The University awarded Fidler $1,367 for the project, with Fidler covering the remainder of his expenses himself. Peter Kaye, assistant dean of undergraduate and professional programs at SCS, said that Fidler’s accomplishment “is one more example of how our students can compete with anyone.”

Fidler’s research in France is tied to a quarter-long independent study class with Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Shirin Fozi-Jones, a specialist in medieval tomb sculpture at Northwestern. In his grant proposal Fidler noted that “my scholarly work has increasingly focused on the intersection between art, death, and the sacred.” As an undergraduate Fidler has presented two papers at art history symposia, published a paper in Vestnik: Journal of the School of Russian and Asian Studies, and contributed to the online journal of The Birch. After he graduates from Northwestern in December 2012, Fidler plans to pursue a doctorate in art history.

To explore a concept as abstract as the pervasiveness of death on a site used as a reliquary and royal necropolis dating back to the early sixth century, Fidler created some concrete ways to examine the historic abbey, using photographs, drawings, and written observations to compile a comprehensive catalog of representations of death in tomb sculptures. He also assessed experiential factors such as the temperature of the flagstones on which worshippers stand, the air currents that circulate incense in the church, and structural changes from renovations and reconstructions over the centuries that doubled the aisles in the nave to make tombs and relics more accessible to the public.

H. Paul Friesema, Professor Emeritus of Political Science

When summer rolls around, many Northwestern professors head to research libraries. H. Paul Friesema, professor emeritus of political science and faculty associate at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research, heads outdoors. Friesema finds his source material in national parks, shorelines, and canyons. He spends summers in national parks and on Indian reservations, where he works in archives, conducts interviews, and studies both the issues and the landscapes. He also places students in national parks and on Indian reservations and then spends much of the summer visiting them and supervising their work and research.

This summer Friesema and his wife (and record keeper) camped out at the North Cascades National Park complex and Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area in Washington state. He has also been to such sites as Rocky Mountain National Park and Indiana Dunes. In past summers Friesema has visited students doing environmental fieldwork all over the country from the US Virgin Islands and the Everglades up to parks and native villages above the Arctic circle. During one spring break he and some colleagues took a class of students to the Southwest where they based the class on houseboats on Lake Powell, a reservoir on the Colorado River created by the flooding of Glen Canyon in a controversial dam project on the Utah–Arizona border.

Friesema’s love of nature goes way back — as an undergraduate at Michigan State University he majored in forestry — but his path to becoming an expert on environmental policy issues is as full of twists as the rivers and canyons he frequents.

From law school to the ranch

After college Friesema earned a law degree from the Detroit College of Law and became a member of the bar in Michigan. Friesema says that even before he finished law school he decided not to practice as an attorney. Nevertheless, his legal skills would come in handy when he later helped write briefs on environmental issues and Native American rights that were presented to the US Supreme Court.

After law school Friesema decided to pursue his interest in urban and racial politics. He earned a master’s degree in political science from Wayne State University, followed by a PhD in political science from the University of Iowa, where he wrote a thesis on metropolitan political structures, exploring how problems are solved in regions such as the Quad Cities clustered along the Mississippi River in Iowa and Illinois. Friesema had completed his thesis and was teaching at the University of Iowa in 1968 when he accepted an offer to come to Northwestern and teach urban politics. He arrived at about the time of the infamous Democratic convention, when Chicago and many other cities were plagued by urban riots. In the next few years college campuses were also hit with major turmoil, culminating at Northwestern in the “Great Strike” after the Cambodian invasion and the killings at Kent State. Long-haired faculty like Friesema were pressed into extra service, in part to keep the University from burning. As a reward of sorts for that work Friesema received an unencumbered research leave. “As junior faculty diverted from our scholarship we were given extra leave time,” says Friesema. “Since our three kids weren’t yet in school, we took off for a ranch in New Mexico.”

At Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian conference and research center near Santa Fe, Friesema was deep into writing a book about churches and the urban crisis — a topic somewhat out of synch with the scenery around him, the dramatic southwest landscape painted by artist Georgia O’Keefe at her studio on Ghost Ranch. But Friesema also had a small Ford Foundation grant to examine the violent confrontations over land rights in the 1960s between the Hispanic and Pueblo residents of New Mexico and the US Forest Service. “That proved to be so interesting that I never finished the book on churches,” he says.

“Over the years my academic focus changed. I merged my interest in environmental issues with my interest in the struggles of disadvantaged groups. My classes became more focused upon environmental policy issues as well as upon the politics of tribal and indigenous people, both in the United States and around the globe.”

Much of Friesema’s recent work addresses the politics and policy issues arising from the environmental assessment process and how it can be incorporated into land-use planning and decision making. His research projects include a long-term study of the political empowerment of native peoples on natural resource issues and have included an examination of the planning of national parks in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and similar work throughout Central America and Asia. His major ongoing work is examining how national parks grapple with the great environmental problems of this century — threats to global diversity, climate change, and water distribution. He is also focusing upon parks as tribal homelands. Friesema is the author or coauthor of four books, numerous monographs and some 30 scholarly articles.

Cultivating courses on the environment at Northwestern

Friesema’s growing interest in environmental policy making coincided with a surge of interest in environmental issues nationally in the late 1960s. At Northwestern he shaped new undergraduate courses and programs in environmental studies. Among them was the Northwestern Environmental Field School — administered through the Summer Session — which until recently was directed by Friesema, who for more than 20 years has visited and still visits students camped out and working on resource management and research for national parks.

In 2005 he was instrumental in creating the Environmental Policy and Culture (EPC) program in the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and served as its first director, an undergraduate program that has proved to be very popular. In recognition of Friesema’s pivotal role in developing environmental studies at Northwestern, the H. Paul Friesema Award for Environmental Leadership and Academic Achievement was created to recognize one EPC student every year. WCAS cited Friesema as having “taught generations of students about the sustainable use of natural resources and inspired them to appreciate the role of individuals, communities and government in protecting the environment.”

Almost as soon as Friesema arrived at Northwestern in 1968, he began to teach at University College, the predecessor to the School of Continuing Studies. “SCS students bring a wealth of experiential background to discussions,” says Friesema. “An SCS class would be likely to include social workers, maybe a city cop and possibly a community organizer — bringing really great urban experiences to public policy courses.”

Native peoples and the natural world

In Politics and Nature in a Comparative Perspective, an SCS course that considers the impact of political processes and structures upon natural systems, Friesema begins with environmental philosophy, asking students to consider the ethical underpinnings of environmental concerns and encouraging them to develop their own “land ethics.” They examine the role of indigenous people, domestically and globally, in the struggle to protect biodiversity. “Many areas that are threatened biologically are also homelands,” says Friesema.

In this struggle over natural resources, Friesema notes that there have been some rousing successes, beginning in the 1960s when the Taos Pueblo, a Native American tribe in New Mexico, fought for the return of mountain land surrounding their sacred Blue Lake that had become part of the Carson National Forest early in the 20th century.

More recently Native Americans have halted or reversed dam developments and revived fisheries. On the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, one of only a few rivers in the Pacific Northwest where all five species of Pacific Salmon return to spawn, the National Park Service had long sought to remove two dams that have decimated the fish population. But it was not until the members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe asserted their land rights that the dam removal is finally being accomplished. “The amazing thing is that groups that we thought were disadvantaged, that we thought of as always losing, have become increasingly successful. In the United States, tribes have become very important in the ongoing struggle over natural resources. The survival of the tribe can mean the survival of the natural world.”

Katya Siddall, an SCS student earning a bachelor of science degree in anthropology, received a prestigious Undergraduate Research Grant from the Provost’s Office last fall. The grant supported her work in paleoanthropology, the study of human origins.

Kayta Siddall in the field

The initial focus of Siddall’s research project was to support a simple method to determine the sex of modern human skeletons using only the pelvis. Early last fall she visited the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, to study their collection of fossil casts and compare their anatomy to that of modern humans. This research led her to believe that her method not only could be used in contemporary forensic anthropology to determine whether bones are male or female, but also could be applied to ancient fossilized remains of human ancestors.

This research led her to believe that her method not only could be used in contemporary forensic anthropology to determine whether bones are male or female, but also could be applied to ancient fossilized remains of human ancestors.

Siddall applied for and received a $1,000 Undergraduate Research Grant to fund her return to Washington in December. Along with her thesis adviser, Erin Waxenbaum, lecturer in anthropology, she spent a week photographing and measuring pelves from the Smithsonian’s collection of more than 2,000 modern human skeletons. This work established a large baseline population for comparison to fossils.

The grant funded research to fuel four journal articles, Siddall says, such as one she is working on for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. In addition, her work has been accepted for presentation at the international meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society this spring, a rare honor for research by an undergraduate. “If you spend a week at the Smithsonian, you can get enough data to write up for at least a year,” she says.

Undergraduate Research Grants are part of a major effort at the University over the past decade to fund the independent research projects of undergraduates. “It’s a very competitive process, with all Northwestern undergrads eligible,” says Peter Kaye, assistant dean for undergraduate and post-baccalaureate programs at SCS. “This is quite an achievement.” Siddall also received an Osher Scholarship from SCS and a Foster/FAN grant from the anthropology department in 2010 to support her summer fieldwork in Kenya.

Siddall, who is the single parent of a four-year-old daughter, came to SCS in 2007 as a biology major with the intent of going on to medical school. Everything changed, however, when she took anthropology courses with Waxenbaum and Marco Aiello, both popular instructors at SCS. Now she is focusing on graduating from SCS in 2012, applying to top graduate programs in paleoanthropology, and planning several articles for major academic journals and talks for learned societies.