July 30, 2018

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

Some very interesting things can turn up in drawers and closets at the Institute of Optics, which was founded in 1929 and is the oldest such institute in the country.

When Per Adamson, director of teaching labs, found what appeared to be an old telescope, he brought it to the attention of assistant professor Jennifer Kruschwitz. There was enough information on a nameplate for Jennifer to track down the patent.

The device, she discovered, was a century-old subtractive colorimeter that Loyd A. Jones, a former Eastman Kodak chief physicist, OSA president, and key figure in the Institute’s founding, invented to help test how well ships were camouflaged from German U-boats during World War I.

That’s pretty interesting in itself. But what impresses me even more is how Jennifer is using this device as a teaching resource.

For example, at her suggestion, Dan Kim ’17 further researched the device and its inventor, then carefully disassembled and refurbished the colorimeter as his senior thesis project. This gave Dan a solid grounding in color science, which is now helping him in his new job as a thin film process engineer at Guardian Industries in Carleton, Mich.

And Jennifer plans to use the device in her classes to help teach students about the basics of color science.

In the meantime, the project earned the outstanding poster award at a recent Munsell Centennial Color Symposium at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. What a great story! Read more here.

Equally compelling are the last of the blog posts by students who participated in this summer’s Ghana field school, studying historic coastal forts. Samantha Turley makes a strong argument for involving Ghanian communities in the efforts to preserve the forts. Ewan Shannon helps illustrate the multidisciplinary nature of the field school, describing how he learned more about the boat builders who work on the beaches next to Elimina Castle for his ethnographic research. Under the leadership of faculty members Renato Perucchio, Chris Muir, and Mike Jarvis, and faculty at the University of Ghana, the field school this year succeeded in broadening its scope beyond analyzing bricks and mortar to establishing the historical and anthropological context of the structures. Kudos to all involved in what has quickly become an outstanding research and global experience for our students.

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