One cannot help but catch some of Dr. Kimberly Ippolito’s enthusiasm after being with her only a short time. She exudes it with every word, every gesture. A self-proclaimed lover of fun and conversation, Ippolito tells her story with gusto and excitement, just like she teaches her Biology classes at AU. “In the third grade, I read Clara Barton. This was one of those third grade books about diseases in the battlefield and how she went in and tried to help them. And I decided that I wasn’t going to be the nurse who helped them; I was going to be the person who figured out what caused the diseases,” Ippolito explained. Her ambition carried on throughout her childhood and eventually led to her PhD and work in clinical virology in a sexually transmitted disease clinic in Dayton, Ohio. As a researcher in the field of molecular biology, she was on the front lines during the 1980s when the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit the United States. She loved her work, comparing it to a kind of biological CSI, where she was trying to track down the culprit virus. But then a contradiction occurred—her first husband abandoned her.

“When my husband left after 21 years… I had been a good girl. I had gone to church. I had sung in the choir. I had taught Sunday school. I had been there every time the doors were open. God and I had this contract that if I did everything right, then He guaranteed that I’d have a good marriage. He messed up His end of the contract,” she thought at the time. But in her grief, Ippolito discovered that she had a lot to learn. “It was then that I came to the shattering realization that God didn’t play by my rules, and that I couldn’t figure out God and make Him do what I wanted Him to do. That was earthshaking,” she concluded. Then a single mother of three, Ippolito also realized that she couldn’t keep up her dangerous work with AIDS research. She decided to pursue teaching as a profession so that she could spend the summers with her children. Her one and only job application went to AU, where she felt God’s calling, and the rest is history—a history which includes two Nicholson Awards for excellence in teaching. But then another contradiction occurred—this time it was a good one.

“When I came to AU I met Dan Ippolito and wasn’t particularly interested [in him]. He was too stuffy. Way too stuffy. And I’m fairly laid-back, fun-loving, and a little mischievous,” Ippolito said with a grin. But they did have one thing in common: both loved to talk. Their conversations led to a more serious relationship. Two years later, they married and blended their family of now five children. The family has found a home in the Church of God and has grown up in Anderson thanks in no small part to Ippolito’s famous cooking.

As a Biology professor, Ippolito tries to energize her students about subjects that are often seen as boring. Although much of the study done has its intent in being used in the medical field, some parts of Biology are “just fascinating,” she said. The questions that evolution and creation raise are not too messy for Ippolito’s classroom, though. She tries to teach her students what her own life has taught her: “It’s not as black and white as we tend to make it. And I don’t necessarily think that any one of the positions [on the origin of life], in and of itself, is totally correct. I foundationally… believe that God was the Creator. How exactly how that happened, I don’t know. I have a lot of questions still… It’s kind of like when I deal with Phillip, my stepson who is mentally handicapped. He has Fragile X Syndrome. I know that God is good, but when I see his handicap, I wonder. I can’t necessarily integrate those two. And so I hold them both in my head, but sometimes they don’t get along together… I know that God is good.” Her mission, as she sees it, is to help open students’ minds to the different ideas presented, because real faith, as she has shown, can stand the intellectual and emotional storms of life.