Inspire, Spring 2004

as Honor Teams. These teams distinguished themselves by winning 80 games over a four-year span, claiming two NAIA District 22 titles, earning two trips to the NAIA National Tournament, and winning one Mid-Ohio Conference championship. Programming Excellence Two Cedarville University computer science teams recently competed at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Regional Programming Contest for the East Central region. Out of 128 teams from schools in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and portions of Canada, one of the Cedarville teams finished 13th. “This was an extremely good showing for our team,” explained Dr. David Gallagher, associate professor of computer science. “The regional contest was distributed across four sites. Our top team was the second place team for our site out of approximately 30 teams, coming in Inspire 9 behind only a team from Miami University (of Ohio). Note also that schools with graduate programs are allowed to have one graduate student on each three-person team, which puts us at something of a disadvantage.” Cedarville University finished ahead of schools such as Ohio State, Rose-Hulman, Penn State, Notre Dame, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Dayton, and Wright State. Cedarville was the top Christian school in the competition. Kudos, Melissa! Senior Melissa Wagner was recently recognized as the H.O.P.E Volunteer of the Year for her more than three years of service at the Greene County Juvenile Detention Center. She was also named the Bachelor of Social Work Student of the Year for the Ohio Region 7 chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). Melissa is a social work major from Fox River Grove, Illinois. Heather and eight students studied chemorepellents — compounds that help neuronal cells grow in the right direction during fetal development. “Chemorepellents help other critters, like single-celled organisms, avoid being eaten,” she explained. “We know these compounds exist, but not very much is known about how they work. Our recent publication, as well as the ones we’ve had before this, contributes another piece of information about how chemorepellent pathways work. We continue to research this problem, as there are still gaps left to be filled before we have a complete picture of the mechanism.” Heather said there are more articles expected to be published — including one in 2004 and two more after that. “Each publication results from the work of a group of students and myself as we tackle a portion of a research question. Some questions are harder than others to answer, so we never know how long it will take us to finish a question and get the data ready to write up,” she said. “Because of this,” she added, “some papers do not come out until a long while after the research starts, since gathering the data may have taken a couple years.” The former students who assisted Heather in this latest published work are Janine Bartholomew ’04, Heidi Everett ’02, Carla Stoltenberg Gaines ’02, Rob Marshall ’02, L. Emery Nickerson ’02, Mark Riddle ’03, Ben Rosner ’02, and Katie Rulapaugh ’03. Like many other students at the conference, Kyle Jackson of Carlisle, Pennsylvania was a repeat attender. “The Cedarville Leadership Conference equipped me with the tools needed to go into my school with confidence,” he said. “It provided me with vital information for living a Christian life in today’s society and gave me memories that will last a lifetime.” The conference is sponsored by The Leadership Institute of Cedarville University. Each year the Institute conducts events designed to enhance the character traits, skills, and knowledge base of developing student leaders. Students Co-Author Research Published in Journal For more than five years, Dr. Heather Kuruvilla (associate professor of biology) has been doing research involving her students that ultimately results in jointly-authored publications. The most recent effort was published in the October 2003 issue of Journal of Comparative Physiology A . The title of the article is “Pharmacological evidence for a P2Y-like receptor in Tetrahymena thermophila.” Dr. Heather Kuruvilla