• Clint Cowan: Geology

• Melinda Russell: Music

• Nelson Christensen: Physics

• Fernan Jaramillo: Biology

Clint Cowan: Geology

Education: B.A. from Carleton College;
M.S. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor;
Ph.D. from Queens University, Canada

What's a sedimentologist?

I study sedimentary rock. Most of the world's fossil repositories are in sedimentary rocks, as are most of the groundwater, oil, and gas reserves. You can tell a lot about a place from its sediments. You can tell what lived there, you can find out the chemical makeup of ancient ocean water, and even what the temperature of the ocean was from clues in sedimentary rock.

Tell me about your research.

I'm studying a Cambrian event-an event from more than 500 million years ago-where there was a major change in global sea level, a major shift in the world's carbon budget, and an extinction of trilobites, which may all be linked. We're trying to understand that event by studying it from different locations in North America.

I'm also studying how large ancient storms and other ancient disruptive events, like earthquakes, twist, break, and deform sediments on the seafloor. My colleagues and I want to see if we can look at the rocks and decipher what it was-if it was an earthquake, a storm, or something else.

Have students changed since you graduated from Carleton in 1983?

Students today seem much better organized than we were. We had a lot more unscheduled time, and maybe they're missing out on just hanging out.

What made you come back?

I had two stints in the corporate world, two years at Exxon and five years at Shell International in The Hague. Corporate work, on some levels, was unfulfilling for me. I realized I didn't want to work at an oil company for the rest of my life, and that helped get me into a Ph.D. program after my master's, and back to Carleton after my Ph.D.

Is it true that everything can be improved upon except your mom's blackberry pie?

The pie is very good. When I was growing up in Lambertville, New Jersey, we had a big blackberry hedge with huge wild blackberries. At one point, we had a man come to our house for a building project, and he tore down the hedge without asking. He said, "I'm done, and, by the way, I've taken out that nasty hedge." My parents were crushed. She makes pies from cultivated blackberries now, and they're still great.

Melinda Russell: Music

Education: B.A. from Simon's Rock Early College of Bard;
M.A. from the University of Minnesota;
Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

On American music:

For many people, American musical culture is the white, bland backdrop against which other people actually have culture. I want to go into that backdrop to see what's there. Ethnomusicology always proceeds as if that study had been done, but in fact those studies aren't done, because they aren't considered interesting. There has long been a feeling in the field that you had to legitimize yourself [as a scholar] by studying something far away and exotic, and I rebelled against that.

On cultural contrasts:

When I'm recounting the musical culture of the San [tribe] in Africa or any other group, there's often a response among students that it's a weird musical culture, because there are any number of values and practices that are new to them. Part of my goal is to show them that we easily could win a contest on weird musical culture, but we just take our own for granted.

It's important to study American musical culture because it helps test the precepts of [ethnomusicology] by bringing it home. We shouldn't just test [theories] on other people.

On the macarena:

One of my chief interests is participation in musical culture and how musical genres signal that you're welcome to participate. The macarena [dance craze], for instance, was just getting started when I assumed my position here in 1996. People often have strong, self-deprecating feelings about their abilityto dance, but then there was this dance craze and people who would never ordinarily dance were dancing. When Madeline Albright taught the macarena to the ambassador of Botswana at a U.N. Security Council meeting, I thought to myself, "Something different is going on here."

I concluded that it was a huge exception to how dance usually works. For example, there were instructions, and it was taught in a bewildering variety of places-schools, Girl Scout troops, nursing homes, and the Republican convention. People were dragging people to go do it-which is hard to remember now, but it did happen. Suddenly, it was everywhere, and it became important to participate.

On singing:

My other research interest has been song repertoires. A few years ago, the National Association for Music Education tried to establish a common body of songs that all Americans should know and called it "Get America Singing . . . Again." There were 42 songs-"If I Had a Hammer," "Amazing Grace," "Danny Boy," "Puff the Magic Dragon," and "This Land Is Your Land," for example. I'm interested in the effort-not only in why anybody would do such a thing, but also in the assumption that people don't sing.

Nelson Christensen

: Physics

Education: B.S. from Stanford University;
Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology

On treating cancer:

One of the problems with radiation treatment is you're not sure if you're hitting the tumor, and you don't want to kill healthy tissue. Right now, we're running an experiment with an electron accelerator. We're going to shoot an electron beam down the barrel of a magnetic resonance imaging magnet, and it will go through a test tube of water. We're going to take a picture with MRI of this water, and then we're going to take a picture again with the beams going through it. The goal is to give a patient radiation treatment for a tumor and be able to visualize both the tumor and the beam that's trying to hit it.

On gravity-wave astronomy:

Einstein predicted that there should be a type of gravitational light. Gravity is somewhat similar to electricity, so if you accelerate an electric charge, you get the kind of light that we would see, and if you accelerate a mass, you get gravitational light. The existence of gravity waves has been confirmed indirectly by a number of people, including [Carleton physics and astronomy professor] Joel Weisberg. But the goal of this project is to measure that gravitational light directly.

On keeping busy:

It's important to have projects of different scales. The work with the gravity wave detectors is a huge collaboration. It's big science, with the potential for huge results. Medical physics, on the other hand, is more down-to-earth work that we can do in a single laboratory. If you have multiple projects, you can make progress on one while you're treading water in another. It's important for me to be able to do stuff with my hands in the lab, and then also participate in a big project.

On his inner Emeril:

Experimental physicists are good cooks because cooking involves tinkering. Good cooks might try a recipe once, but [from then on] they're going to make modifications to see if they can make it better. There are great successes and huge failures, and it involves a similar skill.

On Carleton students:

Teaching physics here is great because the students are so keen to learn. It's like having a conversation with peers. They're fun to have in a class, and then they go out and do great things. What's not to love? It's a great gig.

Fernan Jaramillo: Biology

Education: Universidad de Antioquia, Medell, Colombia;
biology degree from Universidad Javeriana, Bogot; New York University;
Ph.D. from Columbia University

On studying in Colombia:

I come from a system in which I had to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life at age 17. I went into the biology program at my home state university, and I took every science course in sight. I didn't take a single course in the humanities, except for one Spanish literature course.

On liberal arts:

A liberal arts education delays maturation, because it allows you to postpone very hard decisions that people in other parts of the world are forced to make very early. But it also allows you to make a truly informed decision. It makes you a better citizen, because it informs you about things that are important to citizenship. I went to study biology, and nothing but biology. You pay a heavy price for that.

On his research interests:

I am interested in the machinery of life. Within that, I'm interested in sensory systems. I tend to view sensory systems as machines that have been polished by evolution and that do certain tasks very well given the constraints of how they're made of flesh and blood. They epitomize the beautiful trade-off between good design and the limitations of what you have. I'm interested in your auditory system and your vestibular system your sense of balance.

Did you hear that? Right now I'm interested in showing how noise actually enhances the performance of the sensory system. Noise makes you hear better, see better, and [feel] better in some circumstances. When you're in a quiet environment, a little bit of noise enhances your ability to hear, see, and feel. It's a very counterintuitive concept.

On studying in the United States:

It's one thing to take courses at home [in Colombia]; it's another to land in New York City and go to physiology class a week later. I missed a lot. I made a deliberate effort not to have many Colombian friends who would talk in Spanish all the time. I thought about going back, but in graduate school I met an American woman, and I decided to stay.