Dear Alumni, Parents, and Friends of Colorado College:

A unique intellectual adventure awaits every student at Colorado College, sometimes in unexpected places. Students produced site-specific theater in the attic of Palmer Hall (story on page 12), Cameron Sinclair challenged listeners to get involved in architectural activism (page 6), and Tom Cronin has returned to campus to help another generation of students understand true leadership (page 10).

Photo by Tom Kimmell

Intellectual adventure abounds in our science facilities as well. This issue of the Bulletin examines some of the great work our students are doing in what might be called specialty sciences — branches that were once considered niches, but now are growing rapidly because of the many ways they help us understand the world.

Neuroscience, which looks for organic explanations of human learning and behavior, is at once among the toughest and most popular majors at CC. Professor Bob Jacobs uses students to conduct highly regarded research in normal brain neuron complexity, while Professor Lori Driscoll ’94 focuses on the causes of behavior (page 18).

Meanwhile, many pre-med majors take a clinical approach through the sports medicine program. They augment standard class work with tending to injured peers in the campus sports medicine lab under the guidance of Cindy Endicott ’93, then take their clinical experience into Bruce Kola’s cadaver labs to see what underlies the phenomena they observed in living classmates (page 24).

The search for intellectual adventure inspires two geology professors, Henry Fricke and Chris Siddoway, to take students into the field for collaborative research into dinosaur tooth enamel and Antarctic rock outcroppings (pages 22 and 45). And representing the many alumni who forge careers out of their yearning to continue their CC intellectual adventures, Katy Garton ’01 is becoming a science documentary filmmaker (page 26).

Of course, CC is not all field and lab work. Our Tiger hockey team hit Number One — twice! Marty Sertich ’06 and Brett Sterling ’06 are Hobey Baker award candidates, while Patrick McGinnis ’05 put together an unprecedented string of soccer and academic accolades on his way to major league try-outs (pages 16-17).

Enjoy reading, while you contemplate your own next intellectual adventure!

Richard F. Celeste