Representing Sweet Briar at the 35th ANRC National Intercollegiate Equitation Championship, senior Lauren Perhala, junior Ali Davidson and sophomore Olivia Smith rode with a consistency that kept them competitive throughout the two-day event. Their fourth-place overall team finish suggests the strength of the field, as they ended the show just a fraction over 10 points behind the champion team from Savannah College of Art and Design and 3.5 points out of third place.

The American National Riding Commission nationals begin with a written examination on riding theory and equine science. For riders who score better than 95 percent on the exam, bonus points are added to their scores in the riding phases and Sweet Briar riders used their mastery of the material to get a head start. They won the phase with an average team score of 95 and Perhala led all riders with 99 points.

Because of the weather, the over fences performances preceded the program ride, which is normally held on the first day of the tournament. Perhala and Smith combined to win second place in the team derby phase. The third phase was a medal-type course with numerous tight turns. The team executed them well, said coach Mimi Wroten, and they finished fourth but less than one point out of the top three and less than four behind the leader.

Sunday’s chilly wet weather put a damper on horses and riders alike, Wroten said, but they rallied to focus on the flat phase. Again the margins at the top of the standings were small and they finished fifth, despite once more trailing the winning team by only 3.15 points.

All three team riders placed in the top 10 in the individual standings, with Smith at No. 6, Perhala at No. 7 and Davidson at No. 10.

The ANRC national championship was hosted April 21-22 by Centenary College in New Jersey.

Rouse-Bottom’s family owned the Daily Press in Newport News and she was an editor there from 1977 until 1986 when it was sold. She also served on the board of directors.

She had a great love for the history and culture of the Tidewater area, especially Hampton. She gave generously of her time, talent and money to support myriad heritage and arts organizations, including the Hampton History Museum, Fort Monroe National Monument and the Virginia Arts Festival.

Known as a scholar, Rouse-Bottom’s interests were far-ranging. They included raising championship dogs, gardening and sailing. She wrote the lyrics for two works celebrating the centennial celebration of then-Newport News Shipbuilding. She served on numerous boards including the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Virginia Opera and Virginia Symphony.

In Rouse-Bottom’s Daily Press news obituary, Hampton Mayor Molly Ward said, “Dorothy was a gracious, brilliant, funny and warm human being. She was that rare scholar who lit up every room she ever walked into.”

Rouse-Bottom graduated from Sweet Briar with a degree in religion and later earned a master’s in 16th-century English history from Columbia University. Early in her career, she worked in New York as a book editor at various publishing houses. Her marriage to theologian Langdon Brown Gilkey, with whom she had a son, Mark Whitney Gilkey, ended in divorce.

While living in New York in the 1960s, she met and married the American composer John Duffy. Although their marriage of many years eventually ended, the pair remained close friends and collaborators. Duffy helped care for her during the illness leading up to her death.

In 1988, Sweet Briar named her a Distinguished Alumna.

Gratitude of another sort caught in her throat as she shouted encouragement to the last runners turning onto Sweet Briar College’s Quad Road. They were in the home stretch of the fall 2011 Girls on the Run of Greater Lynchburg 5K, a giant pink and green inflatable arch marking the finish squarely in their sights.

“I always tear up when I see the teams running their girls in,” said Hansen, the director of the Greater Lynchburg Council. She meant when the early finishers go back out together to bring in their teammates who might be struggling.

About 475 8- to 13-year old girls from 45 Central Virginia teams raced on Saturday, Nov. 19. It was the first time Sweet Briar hosted the local council’s 5K, the result of a partnership between two organizations with a shared mission to educate and empower women.

More than 25 Sweet Briar students and a dozen staff and faculty volunteered their time or cheered the runners along the course. And it was no cakewalk.

The hardest part was “when we had to walk up this really, really, really, really, really, really big hill,” said 8-year-old Georgia Trainum of Charlottesville, referring to Monument Hill.

Georgia’s older sisters Emma and Megan ran with her, although she is the only one of her siblings to complete Girls on the Run’s 12-week program. The New Balance Celebration 5K Run/Walk is the final challenge.

Eileen Trainum, Georgia’s mother, was attracted to the national organization’s mission to “inspire girls to be joyful, healthy and confident using a fun, experience-based curriculum which creatively integrates running.”

“I love the idea of it,” Trainum said. The program focuses on self-esteem and giving young girls the tools to make good decisions as they enter their teens and adulthood, but it’s emphasis on physical fitness also appealed to her.

It’s not all about self, though. The biggest lessons Georgia took away? “That you shouldn’t be a bully and you should be positive,” she said, nibbling on a tube of Go-GURT.

Positivity was a theme heard over and over among the racers. Ten-year-old Harmony Matts of Liberty Christian Academy described an exercise where they imagined plugging in their “positive” cords.

“If you don’t have your cord plugged in, you are negative,” she said, making a fist and planting it on top of her head to demonstrate.

Matts was evidently plugged in as she queued up at the start line under a brilliant blue sky that accounted for a beautiful but frosty morning. She finished the “fun and very pretty except for the uphills” 3.1-mile course in 35 minutes, close to the frontrunners.

Her mother, Shay Matts, was among hundreds of shivering spectators and volunteers who filled the upper quad and dell to support the girls.

“The last thing she said to me before the race was that she was going to win, ” Matts said.

Find more photos here on the Sweet Briar Facebook page.

The event-packed schedule begins Friday, Oct. 14 with open events such as the popular traditions panel hosted by the Alumnae Board. Guests learn about the College’s history, traditions, clubs and athletics from past and present students.

Bachelor of Fine Arts candidate Ellen Reid will perform her senior thesis, “Such is Life,” combining installation sculpture and dance, beginning at 8 p.m. in the Babcock lobby. At 9 p.m. there will be a free screening of the film “Secretariat,” a prelude to a special lecture and presentation on Saturday evening by Kate Chenery Tweedy, daughter of Penny Chenery, who bred and raced the famous Triple Crown winner.

Alumnae veterans of homecomings past know what the Cardboard Boat Regatta is all about, but parents, if you haven’t seen this crowd-pleaser, now’s your chance. Students in the introductory engineering course, “Designing Our World,” have spent weeks designing, building, testing and refining two-woman boats made of nothing more than 20 pounds of corrugated cardboard and 50 feet of duct tape.

When the starting gun sounds around noon on Saturday, they’ll take to the waters of the Lower Lake, bobbing, weaving and occasionally sinking as they make their way through a figure-eight course. Winning teams are judged on their boat’s speed, buoyancy and overall design.

Other weekend highlights include horse shows and field hockey games, canoeing, Sweet Briar House tours, a theater stagehand workshop, faculty panels and more.

Click here to register or visit the Homecoming and Families Weekend website for the complete schedule.

Click through the image gallery to see scenes from last year’s homecoming.

Under gray skies Thursday afternoon, seniors in Tom O’Halloran’s advanced environmental science lab hoisted a roughly 10-foot weather station tower and began installing an array of meteorological instruments. The station will record air temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, and precipitation, along with a few extras including soil moisture and temperature and radiation levels.

Trying to evenly seat the tower’s three legs into ferrules bolted to a concrete pad, Virginia Butner concluded that jumping up and down on the support members was having little effect.

“I don’t think the tower even notices,” said Butner, a transfer day student from Madison Heights.

They did level it out and, satisfied of its sturdiness, two of Stacy Ludington’s classmates spotted her while she climbed to the top to connect the lightning ground wire and the anemometer, which measures wind speed.

Butner eventually traded places with Ludington and discovered she wasn’t tall enough to see a built-in level on the radiation monitor she was attaching to the end of a boom. Mattie Witt, another local student from Bedford, rummaged through their truck for a mirror. Failing to find anything reflective there, she handed her wristwatch up to Butner.

“It’s a Fossil,” Butner said approvingly, and then, “I can see it,” with even greater enthusiasm only to ponder aloud which way to turn the leveling screws.

When the station is complete, an on-board computer called a data logger will transmit the information every 60 seconds to an Internet-connected laptop housed in a nearby shed. In addition to displaying live weather conditions on Sweet Briar’s website, O’Halloran hopes the Weather Underground will carry the feed.

O’Halloran, an atmospheric scientist, sited the station in the middle of an open field. Wireless Internet access is a challenge and he will have to wait a few weeks for equipment to be installed before going online. The advantage is highly accurate data with no trees or buildings to impede sun or wind. And the shed already had electrical service.

The Internet connection is the only piece of the project the students aren’t responsible for, from soldering and running cables to writing instructions for future students. Each of them will write a users manual for one instrument, said Caroline Sorensen, a double engineering and environmental science major from New York.

The Campbell Scientific weather station was purchased to support ecological and environmental research with a National Science Foundation grant obtained by the biology and environmental studies programs. The instrumentation and the data it collects will be useful to students across the sciences for both classroom experience and research, and to the larger community. Farmers will be able to check soil moisture, for example, and biology students can measure sunlight absorption at the surface.

O’Halloran also anticipates it will be a boon to his students. Teaching climatology in the field presents obstacles, he says.

“You can’t go out and grab the atmosphere. The only thing you can do is measure it. What’s so nice is this is a platform where we can keep adding more instruments,” such as ozone or particulate monitors, he said.

O’Halloran is new in the environmental studies department, which includes the environmental science major. Department chair Rebecca Ambers welcomes his expertise.

“Atmospheric science is hugely important within the scope of environmental science, given the problems of climate change and air pollution that the global ecosystem now faces,” Ambers said. “We are delighted to have Tom with us this year because he brings this new dimension to our department.”

The college will announce when the weather data come online at sbc.edu.

Kelly Mosher says she developed a passion for teaching during high school when she volunteered at a local children’s museum and coached a youth cheerleading squad. Now a senior liberal studies major with a concentration in English and creative writing, she plans to earn her Master of Arts in Teaching from Sweet Briar in 2013. She also is working on her certification in special education.

As a liberal studies major, she is required to complete a summer internship and she knew she wanted to do hers abroad. Mosher spent the summer teaching at a school in Fiji with Projects Abroad, which helped with all of her arrangements. She recently talked with Sweet Briar’s career services about the experience.

Career services: Why did you pursue this internship?

Kelly Mosher: After looking at various countries and programs, my heart was set on going to Fiji. I chose Fiji because not only are the location and culture fascinating, but it is a place where not many Sweet Briar women had been to study. I wanted to experience something out of the ordinary.

CS: What have you gained from the internship?

KM: From my internship in Fiji, I learned a lot about myself. I learned how to be more confident and pushed myself to try new things. I also learned what I needed to improve on in the classroom. I faced a lot of challenges in a class of 30-plus students, but figuring out how to do it on my own and working with the students made the challenge rewarding.

Experiencing another culture firsthand also made me more appreciative of the things that I have and taught me to be more accepting and respectful of the various people and cultures of the world.

CS: Do you believe the skills and experience you have obtained from this internship will help you to further your career goals?

KM: The skills that I gained from my experience in Fiji are something I will keep forever and have already helped shaped my career goals. I know what I need to work on to be a better teacher but I also know what I am a successful at. I also know that traveling and teaching students in underdeveloped countries is something I would like to pursue.

— Interview by Tandilyn Phillips

Sweet Briar College has just released a third marketing video, “A Leader of Tomorrow,” completing a cycle of films that started in fall 2010. All three may be viewed on the College’s YouTube channel.

The series is constructed so that each builds on the last, creating an identifiable trajectory, says President Jo Ellen Parker.

“The first one, ‘A Sweet Briar Woman,’ introduces viewers to the campus as a spectacular place where young women strive for excellence,” Parker blogged. “The second one, ‘She Will Change the World,’ showcases the transformative relationships students establish with Sweet Briar faculty members. And this third and newest one emphasizes students’ intellectual and professional aspirations for their lives after graduation.”

First and foremost, the films are intended to attract prospective students. But the challenge is also to convey a compelling message to parents, prospective donors and alumnae. The videos put a spotlight on the strong inherent advantages of an all-women’s institution as well as a supportive, close-knit learning community where everyone — faculty, alumnae and staff — is personally committed to students’ success.

Parker says each time she watches one, “My pride and enthusiasm for the College are turned up yet another notch.”

Final enrollment numbers for 2011-2012 — the first recruiting period since the rollout began — won’t be determined until late September. However, last fall the College saw a dramatic 20-percent increase in inquiries from prospective students over 2009, and the upward trend continues when comparing 2010 to 2011. On the development side, the alumnae giving rate has remained even despite the challenging economy and the College exceeded its annual fund goals for fiscal year 2011 by more than $26,000.

Heidi Hansen McCrory, vice president for alumnae and development, isn’t drawing conclusions, but she does think marketing plays a role.

“Certainly, marketing from the College in the form of the videos, new admissions materials, website, etc. is important to keeping donors reminded about us, and excited about what’s going on,” she says.

Marketing director Zach Kincaid also takes a guarded view. “So many factors influence these measures, especially enrollment,” he said. “We’re encouraged by the numbers we’re seeing, but we’re also always thinking about what we’re going to do next to get our message out there. Sweet Briar is a great college where women flourish, and we want people to know that.”

She made two radio appearances on the same day to discuss the topic, including a nationally broadcast story on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Gutierrez also was a guest on Lynchburg radio station WLNI’s “Morning Line” on Thursday, May 12.

Listen to the interviews:

Divining Doomsday: An Old Practice With New Tricks

Morning Line:

First, the fellowship came with equipment and training on the GigaPan system, a pioneering tool that has been making headlines in the scientific community. It combines a robotic camera mount and software that stitches together thousands of photographs taken with an ordinary digital camera to make panoramic images with resolutions measured in hundreds of millions of pixels.

Click image to see the plants grow.

With a just-released time lapse feature, viewers can move back and forth through time and space while seeing details at levels not possible before. Steven is among the first scientists to take pictures that can be viewed using the GigaPan Time Machine. Her video, taken early last fall over 26 days showing the growth of Wisconsin fast plants, can be viewed on the Time Machine website.

Another perk is working with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment lab, known as CREATE, which partnered with NASA to develop the technology with support from the Fine Foundation. This Steven describes as “fun.”

The Fine Fellows Program is an intentionally “no-strings-attached approach” that lets participants apply the technology in whatever ways they can think of. Part of the fun, Steven says, is users don’t have to know or do the “nitty gritty” of making the system work. The lab provides the technical know-how so scientists in myriad fields are free to invent ways to use it.

“My job was to take really good pictures,” Steven says of her first effort, which she shot in a now defunct dark room in Guion Science Center. It’s a largely hidden spot but like everywhere else on campus is well known to marmorated stinkbugs. Her Canon PowerShot G10, firing 21 times every 15 minutes, caught the invasive pests dining on the Brassica rapa plants.

She sent the still images to the CREATE lab, where the GigaPan developers stitched together the high-resolution panoramas and time sequences. She says she did so “on faith” that they would one day be a video, because they were taken while the Time Machine was still in development. Steven’s contribution is one of five pilots now viewable on the Time Machine website.

For Steven, an assistant professor of biology at Sweet Briar and plant biologist with research interests in reproductive biology, genetics and evolution, the technology’s prospects are exciting. When she joined the program, she thought about using the time lapse feature for teaching.

“Plants are busy moving and growing and changing all of the time, but we don’t normally see it because they operate in a much slower time scale than we do,” she says. “Time lapse has long been used to bring plants up to our speed, and is a great tool to get students thinking about plants as living things and plants as organisms with behavior.”

Then she attended a Fine conference on gigapixel imaging and began thinking more about research applications.”You can see a single plant within the context of the entire population, and collect data at multiple scales,” she says. “It has the potential to be very useful when studying seasonal change in plants.”

It’s a way to capture a lot of visual information that scientists didn’t have before. All that information can be observed and translated into numbers — albeit painstakingly until software is developed to extract the quantitative data from the film.

Steven is eagerly anticipating a sabbatical in the coming year and will be working with a researcher at the University of Virginia. One project she is contemplating would place the GigaPan rig outdoors to observe the effect of deer grazing on American bellflowers.

Ultimately she plans for her students to work with the system. “My long-term goal is to have students design experiments that I then film with the GigaPan, so that students in other classrooms can make observations on a monthlong plant experiment in a matter of days.”

For more on the GigaPan Time Machine, visit these websites:

Science magazine (requires subscription)
CREATE lab press release
Popular Science magazine

— Jennifer McManamay

Bamboo harvested from the campus’ deep woods, vocals by women singing medieval texts — oh, and an Astroturf ramp and puffy plastic bags. Such a list can only describe Sweet Briar College’s Spring Dance Concert, which is set for 8 p.m. Friday, April 8 and Saturday, April 9 in Murchison Lane Auditorium.

Student choreographers Jessica Murphy ’13, Cortney Lewandowski ’12, Ashley Adams ’11, Ellen Reid ’12 and Sarah Fletcher ’13, along with dance professors Mark and Ella Magruder, will set pieces from solos up to a dozen or so dancers. Most will be modern dance, but viewers also can expect ballet and jazz influences, said Mark Magruder, who directs Sweet Briar’s dance program.

Reid describes her “Study of a Clearing” as an “oblique audio-visual sensory connection” created by five dancers, who will interact with the Astroturf ramp and the inflated bags. The clear pillow-shaped pouches are milk containers salvaged from the College’s former dairy. Joe Monk, Reid’s studio art teacher who’s always on the lookout for sundries to incorporate in his own work, gave her the props.

Reid also is using an original sound score by Lauren Burke ’09. That appeals to Magruder, who, as he often does, is composing and performing his own music in collaboration with a colleague.

“[It’s] new choreography as well as new music, which we like a lot since you’re then making this completely new work,” Magruder said.

He anticipates the concert will feature an eclectic mix of music, including Ella Magruder’s use of recordings by the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble of Russia and the United Kingdom’s Mediaeval Baebes. The Baebes sing in forgotten languages set to music on medieval and classical instruments.

“My dance is about spring and the ancient cycle of growth,” Ella said. “The dissonances, and unusual rhythms and meters in the music seemed to fit both the movement of the dance and the theme of subtle greening in the forest as the season slowly awakens the earth and the plants and creatures within it.”

Murphy’s duet pits Mankind against Time in the forms of Grace Young ’13 and Meagan Oliphant ’11 behind a percussive score that drives a fast, high-energy dance.

“It’s about the constant struggle between mankind and time. For instance, when you’re younger you want time to speed up so you can be older, and then when you’re old you want time to slow down so you can enjoy life to its fullest,” said Murphy, who lives in Lynchburg.

Lewandowski, a resident of Amherst, says her piece has an “Arabian/Spanish” vibe to it. “You get the feeling that you as the viewer are watching from your windows in Arabia at the beautiful women doing a tribute dance to someone special,” she said.

Magruder returned to the land to find props for his choreography. It could get interesting with a dozen or so dancers on stage with those bamboo poles up to 15 feet in length. It’s not the first time he has used the bamboo that grows abundantly on campus in his work, but he said it’s been a while.

The concert is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Magruder at mmagruder@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6150.