Josephine “Josie” McFadden ’61

The Lucy McFadden Teaching Laboratory and
The Bojan Hamlin Jennings Student/Faculty Research Laboratory

The summer before her senior year, Josephine “Josie” McFadden ’61 worked with Bojan Hamlin Jennings, now professor emerita of chemistry, doing research on ultrasound technology through a National Science Foundation grant. The experience was a memorable one for McFadden, who is a member of the President’s Commission. So memorable, in fact, that she asked to name a space — The Bojan Hamlin Jennings Student/Faculty Research Laboratory — in honor of her former professor. “She is an amazing woman,” says McFadden.

McFadden also established the center’s Lucy McFadden Teaching Laboratory, which is named for her younger sister, who is an astronomer, university professor and NASA scientist. Lucy McFadden (pictured here on right, with Josie McFadden) was part of NASA’s Deep Impact mission to blast chunks of rock and ice off a comet, and she gave a presentation about this experience at Wheaton.

As an undergraduate physics major at Wheaton, Josie McFadden says that she felt that the only way to fit enough science into a liberal arts education was to be a science major. “Now, with the college’s Connections curriculum, the sciences are worked into the humanities,” she says. “Classes in art history can touch on scientific learning, for example.”

The new science center promotes the Connections curriculum through spaces that support interdisciplinary learning and research as well as faculty-student collaboration. In establishing the Lucy McFadden teaching lab and the Bojan Jennings research lab, McFadden says that she is happy to be supporting not only science education at Wheaton, but interdisciplinary learning as well.