Wabash College Dean and Professor of Chemistry Scott Feller was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in June to study a protein involved in the initial steps of vision.

The five-year, $511,500 grant covers the research work for Feller and students as they examine the effect of lipids containing polyunsaturated omega-3 fatty acids on the membrane-protein interface. Receipt of this grant ensures 22 years of continuous NSF support for this project, which coincides with Feller’s arrival on campus in 1998.

The study focuses largely on a protein, Rhodopsin, which is found in the retina of your eye. It is the protein that absorbs the photon of light, the first step in vision. The research attempts to understand how the vision process is influenced by the cellular membrane and, in particular, the role of omega-3 fatty acids.

“Omega-3 fatty acids are found in high concentrations in your retina, basically the highest concentrations found in the human body are found there. We’re interested as to why that is,” said Feller. “There are broader scientific implications because this protein is a member of a very large class of proteins that have similar structures. If we understood Rhodopsin, we would understand something about a class of proteins that are very important pharmacologically.”

The second part of this NSF funding is the impact on student education, as the grant will support three student interns each year. The support not only covers work and new equipment in laboratories, but also allows for those students to travel to professional meetings and conferences.

In addition to Wabash students, the research program also includes collaboration with a handful of researchers off campus.

The continuation of Feller’s work, this project titled, “Atomic Modelling of Membrane Proteins,” enables him to maintain both scholarship and teaching while handling the responsibilities of the Dean of the College. To date, the research has produced more than 50 peer-reviewed publications.

“I think it’s important for the Dean of the College to be engaged with his or her discipline because we are asking faculty members to do the same thing,” Feller said. “They have many teaching and service responsibilities on this campus, but we still ask faculty to remain active in their disciplines and to continue to make contributions so that they are actively engaged. I don’t see it differently for me.”

Much of Feller’s research is in computer modeling, so he feels fortunate to receive extended funding and to work closely with scientists throughout the field.

“It was a huge relief to receive this type of extended funding, especially given the tight funding of the last decade,” Feller said. “I have ridden the increasing power and decreasing cost of computers over the last few decades, which has worked very well. I’ve have a lot of really good collaborators – both students at Wabash and professionals off campus.”

This grant will fund research through May 2020.

A textbook published in October by three Wabash professors and a former teacher at the College offers a new approach to public speaking that ties it directly to civic engagement and participation in democracy.

Public Speaking and Democratic Participation: Speech, Deliberation, and Analysis in the Civic Realm was written by Wabash Professors of Rhetoric Jennifer Abbot and Todd McDorman, Assistant Professor of English Jill Lamberton, and Monmouth Professor David Timmerman, who taught at Wabash for more than a decade.

The book was published by Oxford University Press, which describes it as “a unique introductory textbook that provides a comprehensive introduction to the basic skills involved in public speaking—including reasoning, organization, outlining, anxiety management, style, delivery, and more—through the lens of democratic participation. act of civic participation.

“By integrating the theme of civic engagement throughout, Public Speaking and Democratic Participation offers a direct and inspiring response to the alarming decline in civic participation in the U.S. and the climate of vindictiveness in our current political culture.”

As reviewer and Penn State University Professor Lyn J. Freymiller put it:  “The authors suggest that the endeavor of good speaking has a lot to do with being a responsible citizen in society. The book returns to this idea throughout and appropriately ties concepts back to this notion of taking responsibility for our communication.”

Professor of Religion Robert Royalty’s book The Origin of Heresy: A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity was published in paperback in June.

Originally published in hardcover in 2012, the book focuses on heresy as a central concept in the formation of Orthodox Christianity. It traces the construction of the idea of ‘heresy’ in the rhetoric of ideological disagreements in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian texts and in the development of the polemical rhetoric against ‘heretics,’ called heresiology.

Royalty argues that one finds the origin of what comes to be labelled ‘heresy’ in the second century. In other words, there was such as thing as ‘heresy’ in ancient Jewish and Christian discourse before it was called ‘heresy.’ And by the end of the first century, the notion of heresy was integral to the political positioning of the early orthodox Christian party within the Roman Empire and the range of other Christian communities.

Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Jeff Drury presented “The Rhetoric of Rogue Ethos: Chris Christie’s Swing from ‘Boss’ to ‘Bully,’” at the Central States Communication Association Convention in Madison, WI in April. The presentation mirrored the essay he published in November 2014 in the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric.

The article and presentation looked at how Christie’s existing rogue ethos may have hurt his damage control efforts in the wake of the George Washington Bridge scandal because his arguments in that context centered on personal feelings of embarrassment and shame rather than public values of republican leadership.