African American Studies
Marcus K. Adams, Professor Clovis E. Semmes, sponsor, The Racialization of Jimi Hendrix James Marshall Hendrix was a self-taught blues guitarist from Seattle. He played the chitlin' circuit with stars such as Little Richard. Because of his exceptional skills as a guitarist, he was granted honorary whiteness by the music establishment and became the slave Jimi. This paper describes why Jimi, despite his credentials in Blackness, was dismissed by the Black community as a trailblazer of Black popular culture, rejected his honorary whiteness and was redeemed.


Chemistry
Designing Glycosidase Inhibitors- Robert Anderson, an EMU undergraduate student, has been involved in a project focusing on the computational analysis of glycosidase inhibitors. These inhibitors mimic the glucose (sugar) molecule in the active site of the enzymes, and have a great potential for therapeutic treatments of cancer, blood sugar disorders, and HIV. The goal of the project is to determine what features make a
molecule a good glycosidase inhibitor. We start with known inhibitors and compare them with molecules that have similar structures but are not good inhibitors. Both sets of molecules are analyzed computationally, using commercially-available software programs. First the structure of the molecules is optimized by the software. The program then solves the Schrödinger equation to get the wave function of the molecule. Once we have the wave function, we can obtain the partial charges of each of the atoms, the regions of the molecule where electrons are most likely to be, etc. Using this information, we try to predict which of these features allows the molecule to interactive with the active site of the enzyme. We can confirm that our approach works by matching up our results with experimental data that has been obtained from the world’s leading scientists. Ultimately, we would like to be able to predict how specific molecules will act in the active site of the enzymes, thus guiding the work of synthetic chemists.


Foreign Languages and Bilingual Studies
German students Adrienne Muncy who graduated from EMU in April 2004 and Joshua Gartner who graduated in December 2003 have received the distinguished Fulbright English
Language Teaching Assistantship Award. They will leave for Germany and Austria respectively in August 2004 to spend a year in a high school in their chosen country helping to teach English to German children and to consolidate their German language proficiency. Adrienne says: "I am really very excited and I can’t wait to live there a whole year! Besides teaching, I hope to do some research, travel around Europe, and visit friends in Poland."

Adrienne Muncy was a Presidential Scholarship recipient at EMU and she was enrolled in Linguistics and German. Joshua Gartner came to EMU in 1998 to pursue a teaching career in History and German. Both students became serious with their German studies after they had spent a summer in Graz, Austria, with the EMU Study Abroad Intensive German Language Program. Joshua participated for the first time in 2000 and loved it so much that he returned with the program in 2002 and 2003 despite major financial hurdles. Both students stress that studying abroad is absolutely essential when learning a foreign language and they recommend it to all students.

Joshua tells that he would have never dreamed to receive the Fulbright Scholarship, had it not been for his German professors at EMU who continuously encouraged and supported him. Adrienne is especially thankful to Dr. Carla Damiano who guided her through the application process drawing from her own experiences as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant before her graduate studies.