COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 5 CHRISTINE KRESCHOLLEK, SCIENCE SOURCE new vision of the 20th century was really at the heart of it, he says. “Such intellectuals, experiencing the rise of Fascism and Nazism, viewed the 20th century as a time of acceleration, mobilization, innovation and fascination with everything new. Modernity turned its back on the past, even when the cost was deadly.” The thinkers he follows, then, believed that we need to reconsider time as a key to modern development. It’s not by coincidence that the Germans invented blitzkrieg or that Einstein and Freud reimagined the individual psyche and the universe. “That’s also where our post-1945 notion of globalism and global culture came from,” Lebovic says. “Within the humanities, that’s how we came to see religion studies, critical studies, political science and literature in general. Temporal concepts were very popular in the second half of the 20th century.” Modern Jews stood at the crosspoint between two periods: 19th-century liberalism and modern nationalism. On the one hand, liberals demanded to emancipate the Jews as citizens of various European countries. On the other hand, we see the rise of anti-Semitism. The competing ideologies show two different utopian visions, one of a multicultural liberal society and another of pure Aryan race. Neither one considered the formal borders of Germany, between Poland and France, relevant to their vision. Lebovic’s message is not without hope: “Time is the best equalizer,” he says. “We’re all born, live and die. If you think about that point, your whole identity’s seen with very different eyes because there’s no major difference between someone speaking French and someone speaking German. The thinkers I’m interested in designed their thinking about politics, history, religion and literature from that perspective. It’s how we construct our story—beginning, middle and end—that allows us to think as equal human beings rather than through spatial differentiation, which is always thinking through hierarchies, minorities, those who belong and those who don’t.” PHYSICS INTENSIVE STUDENT RESEARCH Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, a team of Lehigh faculty are collaborating with colleagues at the University of Bordeaux, France, to develop advanced imaging techniques and innovative microscopic probes to determine how biological cells respond to force and to train U.S. students in these techniques. Led by Daniel Ou-Yang, professor of physics, and Aurelia HonerkampSmith, assistant professor of physics, a team of Lehigh students will work in Bordeaux laboratories during the summer and at Lehigh for the rest of the year to develop imaging techniques and new biomaterials. Students are mentored by faculty as they explore novel methods of measuring the mechanical properties of soft materials of multicellular organoids, time-lapse confocal imaging of mechanotransduction during stem cell differentiation and cell migration in complex biological environments and magnetic nanoparticle-mediated transport of membrane-bound proteins. The main goal of this project is to train U.S. students while developing advanced imaging techniques and innovative tools to determine how biological cells respond to forces. These experiments will help researchers understand how stem cells differentiate into functional cell types, how cancer cells spread and how blood flow is regulated. Understanding how cells interact with their environment is essential for developing treatments for a variety of health-related issues, ranging across joint repairs, cancer therapeutics, tissue engineering and heart and vascular disease prevention and treatment “The idea is to match one student with multiple advisers in the lab,” Ou-Yang says. “The program is designed with a goal to pair an undergrad student with a graduate student, so they participate in a team project that involves more than one faculty adviser. It’s very hands-on, very immersive, so the students will integrate their work done at Lehigh with that in French laboratories. It’s good for students’ futures, not only as some research experience on their resume, but in how they realize major research collaborations involving multiple researchers in an international setting are carried out and how they can be part of it. They get a different global view of how the research is done differently and which parts are done similarly.” “I think for students, a very intensive 10-week international research experience in Bordeaux can give a student the confidence to say, ‘Look, I really am a scientist. I’ve done this very unusual thing,’” Honerkamp-Smith adds. “I think that’s valuable for students who might not initially feel like they belong in the research enterprise.” Daniel Ou-Yang and Aurelia Honerkamp-Smith in her lab. Dividing human mesenchymal stem cells.
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