Serving through science
By Deborah Lilly
Editor’s note: The cover story in this issue is a series of stories about biology alumni. We wanted to share with readers how the Biology Department and Anderson University have prepared biology students to make a difference in the world throughout the years. We touch on education, medicine, and ecology. In each category, alumni felt blessed by the education they received at AU and have gone on to make a significant impact in their field of study.
Reaching out overseas
It wasn’t the way Anderson University senior Jake Mumbower typically spent his mornings. Having heard of the phenomenon called “the sunrise,” he’d never actually seen it. Now he was up well before 6 a.m. to take a cold shower, climb in the back of the pick-up truck, and travel the rutted roads of Honduras to help provide medical care to a small village. Once there, he saw scabies, rashes, infections — conditions he’d only read about in his micro-biology textbooks. “It was my first time to really get hands-on experience with people outside a lab,” says the pre-med major.
Mumbower’s experience was part of a Tri-S trip led by Dr. Kimberly Lyle-Ippolito, biology professor at AU. It was Lyle-Ippolito’s sixth trip to Honduras helping the staff with Heart to Honduras. This particular trip took place over spring break 2007. Besides the cost of the trip, each student contributed $100 for painkillers, vitamins, inhalers, and other medications to be dispensed in each village. The students completed the triage for patients, seeing 40 to 50 children through elderly adults a day. Lyle-Ippolito manned the “pharmacy” dispensing medications.
“When you’re in school, you’ve got your nose in the books the whole time,” says Michael Alford, also a pre-med major on the trip. “It was good to go down there and see the human aspect of what we’re really studying for. It helps develop compassion. It’s a great thing to experience.”
Honduras has become a regular destination of Dr. Robert W. McCurdy BA ’59. Since his retirement as a general surgeon in Anderson, Ind., he’s taken 26 short-term missionary trips. Another common destination for McCurdy is Kenya.
“There are many places in the world where people cannot receive surgical care without missionary surgeons, and it’s going to be that way for the foreseeable future,” McCurdy explains. “These trips have not only given me opportunities to continue doing surgery, but also to help people who wouldn’t receive surgery otherwise.”
McCurdy was fortunate enough to study and be in his practice before surgical care was broken down into specialties. He and his surgical partner in Anderson provided everything but neurosurgery, so his skills and experience have greater depth. Having started his career in the 1960s, he also has the experience of practicing without all of the modern equipment that Third World hospitals lack.
Sarah Lantz BA ’03 hopes to build a career in the medical mission field. She explains that God inspired this direction for her life through a World Vision newsletter when she was 16 years old. She came to AU because of the Tri-S program. She traveled on one Tri-S pre-med trip to Honduras led by Dr. Chad Wallace, a professor of chemistry and physics at AU. After graduation, she put medical school on hold for a year to return to Honduras with the Cornerstone Foundation and work in the medical mission field.
“I got a fabulous education for someone who had never been to medical school,” she says. Even though she came to AU for the Tri-S program, she is also pleased with the education she received in the biology department. “I got a good foundation for medical school,” says Lantz. As a medical student at Indiana University, she discovered some areas where she was even a little ahead of her classmates who had graduated from bigger universities.
Lantz graduates from IU’s medical school in May. From there, she’ll likely head to one of the southern states for a residency in general surgery. “I’m not sure where God will eventually put me,” she admits, but she knows it will be in a mission field.
If McCurdy’s experience is any indication, Lantz has an exciting career ahead of her. “I was lucky to have a vocation which enabled me to put the end of my career into this type of work experience,” McCurdy says. “The last five years doing medical missions have been the most rewarding five years of my life.”
Conserving for the future
Ben O’Neal BA ’03 has a passion for nature. It comes from childhood afternoons wandering in the woods near his home and family vacations spent at state parks. As a teenager, O’Neal was advised to pursue a career in something he loved. “I was fortunate to have so many rich experiences as a kid and young man in the outdoors that I knew I had a passion for it,” says O’Neal. “As I matured into an adult, that passion turned into a conviction to teach stewardship of those resources.” O’Neal is now a waterfowl conservationist in his second year of doctoral studies at the University of Illinois.
O’Neal grew up in a family with five kids in Illinois. His dad supported the family as a small-business owner. When it was time for O’Neal to go to college, finances were tight, but then he was offered the presidential scholarship at Anderson University. “It was a tremendous opportunity for me to get a quality education free of charge,” says O’Neal. “The impact of that academically and financially for me and my family is something we have never forgotten.”
After earning his biology degree at AU, O’Neal entered the University of Illinois for graduate studies. His goal is to teach wildlife conservation to college students and continue to do research in the same field.
But right now, O’Neal is researching and writing his dissertation on the migratory ecology of ducks. As strange as it may sound, his interest in waterfowl conservation comes from a passion for waterfowl hunting.
“I hunt animals, but I also work passionately to conserve them, so I often have to explain how the two complement each other rather than contrast each other,” explains O’Neal. “I need to do everything I can to conserve them and make their population stable and viable so they can not only be hunted, but so they are also maintained as they’re intended.”
Waterfowl hunting for O’Neal is about more than just harvesting the animals. It’s about witnessing a sunrise in late October when everything is brilliant with color. It’s about being with family and friends. “It’s kind of my therapy of sorts,” says O’Neal.
O’Neal also finds waterfowl a fascinating study. “They have the ability to orient as they move through continents,” explains O’Neal. “They have the physiology to endure conditions ranging from a sub-zero winter to a hot summer. They’re really spectacular individuals. They’re a rich resource in terms of their abundance and an important part of a unique ecosystem.”
Wildlife conservation isn’t just a passion or a job to O’Neal. He also sees it as his duty to God. He refers to God’s command in Genesis 2 to till and keep the garden. “I find great joy and intimacy with God when I’m surrounded by wild places and things,” O’Neal says. “I want to do everything I can to share that with others and with generations to come.”
Preparing minds at home
Christian Horner BA ’91, MBA’ 01 and Katie Diller BA ‘07 have discovered a passion for teaching science. Looking back, it’s a surprise to them both. Horner originally came to Anderson University as a music business major, switching to pre-med and business. It wasn’t until after he graduated and began working with youth at his church that he decided to go into teaching.
Diller chose to come to AU in part because of the nursing program. But she spent a summer at a camp coaching and teaching youth and became interested in education. Today both Diller and Horner are filling a desperate need in the public school system — teaching science.
After discovering his interest in youth, Horner explains, “I’ve always had a real love for science and I thought teaching would be the best of both worlds.” He returned to his alma mater to pick up education and additional science courses so he could teach both biology and chemistry. He began teaching at Lowell High School in Lowell, Ind., and then Alexandria High School near Anderson. When Alexandria had difficulty finding a physics teacher, Horner returned to AU for more physics courses. Today, he teaches physics and is the science department chair at Westfield High School.
“We do a lot of wild and crazy things in physics and just have a really great time,” he says.
“We make the students forget they’re taking physics.”
Nothing Horner has studied at AU has been wasted. He uses music in his classroom to teach the concepts of sound and sound waves and to create rap songs about physics concepts. His broad base of science classes and his AU MBA help him manage a staff of science teachers and the department’s budget.
Diller is a first-year teacher at Mt. Vernon High School in Indiana. While high school career tests indicated she should pursue art or English, she says, “I had a really great biology teacher in high school, and the more I studied biology in college, the more I really enjoyed it.”
Diller pursued the TeachScience program at AU, which not only provided her with all of the classes she needed for a teaching career, but also a full biology major in case she decided to pursue medical school instead.
“Before I student-taught, I though I would end up taking the strictly science route. Teaching was my fall-back plan, not a career choice,” says Diller. “But once I started student-teaching, my mind just came alive. It was a perfect mix of creativity and science.”
It’s also a field that’s in demand. “I got several job offers,” says Diller. “Even well into the summer and after school had started.” Horner adds that it’s not always easy to keep a physics teacher on staff because they can go almost anywhere they want to go.
But both Diller and Horner are happy where they are. “I love teaching,” says Horner. In the end, Horner explains, it’s not just about teaching science; it’s about helping students succeed.
“I want them to learn a little bit of science,” says Horner, “but if they learn to study and become successful in college, that’s the test.”
Teaching the next generation
Radiologist and college professor Dr. Lloyd Schnuck BA ’64 has been called a “gadget geek” by his peers. “I have gadgets of all kinds. I can’t go far without them,” he says as he pulls the latest i-Pod out of his pocket. “I can’t use a cell phone, but I have all kinds of other things.”
It was his love for gadgets that led him to a career in radiology. To him it’s “gadget work,” although a bit more complex than the radios he built as a child.
Schnuck first became interested in medicine as a boy after hearing medical missionaries speak at his church. His plan was to go to a state school in his home state of Georgia. His parents had other plans. Being a year younger than his peers in school, Schnuck says, “My parents thought that I was too young and immature for a state school.” So they sent him to Anderson University. Forty years later, Schnuck has no regrets about coming to AU. He explains that it provided a good support system for him and taught him lessons he still carries with him today, such as patience, humility, and love of others.
After graduation, Schnuck returned to Georgia and entered the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. After medical school, he went to Vietnam.
“It was the popular thing to do,” says Schnuck. “It was also the mandatory thing to do.” He spend eight months at Fort Bragg and 13 months in Vietnam, where he and another doctor ran a small hospital, treating wounded and delivering babies of dependents of the soldiers. In their spare time, they would visit orphanages to provide health care for the children.
When Schnuck came back to the United States, he started specialty training in radiology. Besides the mechanical side of radiology, he enjoyed the challenge of looking at all the evidence and making a diagnosis. Schnuck practiced for 20 years in Savannah when he decided that so many new developments had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, he should go back to the Medical College of Georgia for a refresher course. He went back for a year and was offered a position at the medical school.
Schnuck is the chief of the Department of Imaging and Radiology at the Augusta Veterans Affairs Medical Center and enjoys a joint position of both teaching and practicing radiology. He enjoys the interaction with his students and the veteran population. Of his patients, he says, “The veterans are a wonderful population. They have great life stories, and they’re a grateful group of people.”
To interested students, Schnuck says, “The field of radiology is growing so fast while the number of radiologists is growing slowly that we’re being worked to death.” Even so, it’s a competitive field. “For 200 seats, [the Medical College of Georgia] has 2,000 applications, and the first 50 percent are chopped out on grades alone.” And the numbers in the radiology program are even smaller.
But once you’re in, it can be a rewarding career, says Schnuck. “Radiology is a chance to make a difference in an earlier diagnosis,” he explains. “It can exclude diseases, and it can point therapy in the right direction.”
