Faculty-student collaboration
Wheaton built on its long-standing commitment to student and faculty research in the sciences with the opening of a new science facility in 1968. Since the late 1950s, students had been conducting original research in ultrasonics under the direction of Professor of Chemistry Bojan Hamlin Jennings.
Grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society, and other prestigious groups funded the purchase of scientific equipment and provided financial support for student researchers to study high-frequency sound. Professor Jennings and Suzanne Townsend Purrington '60, described this research in an article published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry in 1961.
Wheaton’s tradition of faculty-student collaboration in the sciences continues as exemplified by Professor of Astronomy Tim Barker and his students. With support from the National Science Foundation, the Wheaton researchers are seeking to uncover supernovae in other galaxies. In June 1994, the team logged its first discovery: a dying star some 65 million light-years away.
Another of Wheaton’s most distinguished faculty members was Rhodes Scholar Ernest John Knapton, professor of history from 1931 to 1968. An authority on the French Revolution in general and the Napoleonic era in particular, Professor Knapton wrote more than 50 scholarly articles and book reviews as well as 10 books. Among the books he wrote was Empress Josephine, the definitive biography of Napoleon’s wife. In May 1969 Jack Knapton was the only American invited to the Third International Congress of Napoleonic Studies, held at Portoferraio, Elba, to commemorate the bicentennial of Napoleon’s birth. At the conference, he presented a paper titled “American Historical Writing on Napoleon in the Twentieth Century,” for which Wheaton history major Susan Aivano Hall '70 did much of the bibliographic work. Wheaton recognized Professor Knapton’s achievements by awarding him an honorary degree and naming the social sciences building in his honor in 1972.