Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, writing department professor, joined the faculty at Ithaca College in 1985 after receiving her Ph.D. from Syracuse University. She has published essays and articles in the Journal of Teaching Writing, Gender and Utopia in Advertising, Literature and Medicine, and Ararat. She is the author of The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing about Trauma; and coeditor of Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. MacCurdy, though retiring from IC, will continue to work in higher education. At Hampshire College, she will serve as Senior Advisor to the President. “My favorite part of teaching is encouraging students to create connections between their own intellectual and personal experiences and those of others, to facilitate the dawning of intellectual empowerment and ownership of their own education,” MacCurdy says. “It’s the one profession where the goal is to make ourselves obsolete, that is to teach our students a methodology to become independent learners.”

Professor Vicki Cameron joined the biology department at Ithaca College in 1985, after completing the research for her Ph.D. in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado. Her Ph.D. research focused on how energy is produced in the simple organism baker’s yeast. After coming to IC, she continued to work on this research in collaboration with her students. She published a number of scientific papers, coauthored by her student collaborators. “The research we carried out was as much about teaching students how to do science and how to think about science as about the number of publications we generated,” Cameron says. “I am proudest of the number of students who worked in my lab, the quality of the work they carried out, and what they learned about doing and thinking about science.” During her time at IC, Cameron was successful in obtaining funding for her research, mostly from the National Science Foundation, which provided more than $700,000 during her 23 years. In recognition of her scholarly achievements, she was named the Dana Professor in the Natural Sciences/Mathematics at Ithaca College in 2003. Cameron is retired in South Carolina, playing “lots of tennis.” She kept her subscription to Science magazine, “which allows me to dabble in science without having to work too hard at it.”