Four Goucher faculty embark on ‘Year of Exploration’
Four Goucher College faculty members have been selected as the 2025 cohort of the Myra Berman Kurtz Fund for Faculty Research and Exploration of the Sciences (KRES Fund) Year of Exploration.
Now in its fourth year, the KRES Fund seeks to enable Goucher faculty to remain lifelong learners and continue their intellectual curiosities and passions through exploration of the sciences, technology, and their relationship to society. The fund is designed to encourage faculty to pursue new experiences outside of their prior work, explore novel areas of knowledge, and push disciplinary boundaries. Recipients are provided with a year’s worth of funding to begin these new projects.
This opportunity to pursue a new passion project is made possible by a generous $400,000 pledge to Goucher College from Stuart Kurtz in honor of his late wife, Myra Berman Kurtz ’66. The KRES Fund will support the annual awarding of multiple faculty year-of-explorations over the course of the next decade. In its first four years, this program has supported new research projects for 15 Goucher faculty members from 13 academic disciplines.
The 2025 KRES recipients
Jenn da Rosa, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
Politicizing Science: A Historical and Contemporary Examination
This project seeks to understand how and why certain scientific disciplines become politicized over time. Through detailed historical and contemporary case studies, the research will explore how political, economic, and social forces shape the public perception, acceptance, or rejection of scientific ideas across different periods and cultural contexts. By exploring examples both within the United States and internationally, this research aims to uncover patterns and to develop a grounded theory explaining how and why scientific fields such as climate science, genetics, reproductive science, public health, nuclear physics, and natural disaster impacts and response, among others, become arenas of political conflict, while others remain largely apolitical.
George Greco, Professor of Chemistry
Synthesis and Evaluation of Aptamers That Can Be Used as Drug Delivery Agents for Cancer Drugs
The overall goal of this project, in collaboration with Dr. Bethany Powell Gray of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is to discover a new way of delivering cancer drugs, specifically to cancer cells. Many cancer drugs are highly toxic molecules that are very good at killing cells, but they do not show good enough selectivity for cancer cells over normal human cells. The severe side effects of chemotherapy are a result of the drugs killing cells that should not be killed. One strategy to address this shortcoming is the use of a drug delivery agent. Drug delivery agents are molecules that can bind to both the drug and the cancer cell, thus delivering the drug directly to the cancer cell. Greco and Gray are pursuing the use of aptamers for this purpose. Aptamers are short single stranded DNA or RNA molecules that will fold into specific shapes that allow them to bind to proteins of interest, usually receptors on the surface of cells. The project will specifically focus on synthesizing chemically modified RNA bases to be able to incorporate into the aptamer sequence instead of natural base uracil, which should lead to even greater affinity for the receptors on the cancer cells.
Tom Narock, Associate Professor of Data Science
Data Science Meets Athletics: Bridging Academic Learning and Athletic Excellence
Sports analytics empowers teams and athletes to achieve a competitive advantage through strategic decision-making. Data-driven insights are generated through systematically collecting, processing, and interpreting athletic data, leading to more informed decisions on and off the field of play. This KRES project will create an exploratory collaboration between Goucher athletics and academics. Data science faculty will work with Goucher’s cross country and track & field teams to incorporate advanced analytics into athletic training, with the goal of assisting Goucher’s student athletes in improved training and injury prevention. Automated data collection and predictive analytics will provide coaches with valuable insights and create personalized recommendations for each athlete. By combining quantitative data with qualitative insights, this project aims to create a truly reciprocal partnership—providing athletics with advanced analytical tools while giving students hands-on experience and generating real-world case studies, ultimately strengthening the bridge between academic learning and athletic excellence.
Juliette Wells, Professor of Literary Studies
Body and Mind in Jane Austen
Austen and her contemporaries in Georgian England believed that health of body and mind were intricately connected. She and her characters were invigorated by long country walks, horseback rides, and evenings spent dancing. Wells is curious to investigate present-day scientific understandings of the benefits of movement, exercise, and time outdoors. Her exploration involves both reading and experiential learning through beginning courses in Goucher’s Equestrian Program.