Calvin names chemistry prof top teacher

Calvin College professor of chemistry Larry Louters is the recipient of the school's 2012 Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching: the highest honor that Calvin bestows on a faculty member. The announcement was made at the annual Faculty Awards Dinner held Thursday, February 9, 2012 at Calvin's Prince Conference Center.
See full story: http://www.calvin.edu/news/archive/behind-the-fireworks-louters-is-exemplary-teacher
"I think of this as an honor for the chemistry department," he said. "I have such good colleagues."
"Larry has been the lead faculty member in our department to build the biochemistry program," said chemistry professor Roger De Kock. "He just gets things done."
Louters grew up in the small town of Hollandale in southern Minnesota, just miles from the Iowa border. He attended and played basketball at Dordt College (his coach was Calvin kinesiology professor emeritus Jim Timmer), where he still holds the single-season record with 12.9 rebounds/game during the 70-71 season.
Louters graduated from Dordt in 1971 with a bachelor of science in chemistry. He went on to earn a master's in organic chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1974 and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Iowa in 1984.
He started teaching at Calvin in 1984 on a two-year term position as one of two biochemists in the department. Midway through his first Calvin semester, Louters' colleague Bob Albers was diagnosed with stomach cancer and was unable to continue teaching. Louters stepped in. "That one vignette illustrates much of what Larry has done over the years," De Kock wrote in his nomination letter for the exemplary teaching award. "He has filled in where needed without complaining and without asking for compensating release time." When Albers died, the department did a search, and Louters got the position.
"It's been good from the get-go," he said of teaching at Calvin. "I think what I really like about it is the puzzle of figuring out where the student is at and helping them to understand ...," he said. "When students come into my office and we sit down with a pen and paper to figure something out--that's a fun thing to me."
When Louters debuted at Calvin, there was one 300-level biochemistry course taught per year. Due largely to his pioneering efforts, now there are three and three faculty to teach them--and there are biochem labs in the fall and spring.
"He's a very good teacher, well-liked by students," said chemistry professor Doug Vander Griend. "I think he's particularly warm and even pastoral when it comes to advising."
Louters is also a researcher. His current focus is GLUT 1, a protein involved in the transport of glucose into cells. It's work that could have implications for cancer and diabetes research.
Though he's landed grants from the National Institutes of Health, Merck-AAS and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Louters doesn't have grandiose ambitions for his work. "Nobody in the science division is critically close to winning the Nobel Prize," he said. "We're all just puttering along. We are contributing some solid new scientific information, but they're not knocking down our doors because of our science. They're knocking down our doors for our students because of their training in science."
Louters is also committed to training up the next generation of chemistry majors. He has worked with middle school students from west Michigan during summer Chem Camps (chemistry camps) for 18 years and chemistry-focused Academic Camps for Excellence for 11 years. And this year, he pioneered a Christmas chemistry camp, where students made paper tree ornaments decorated with chromatography.
Calvin's Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching includes a medallion and a significant financial stipend supported by the George B. and Margaret K. Tinholt Endowment fund. The fund was established in 1993 to honor George Tinholt, a former member of the Calvin College Board of Trustees, and his wife, Margaret.
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Matt Kucinski
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Calvin College
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Received on Fri Feb 10 10:38:38 2012