On-Campus Activities: Wiffle Ball

While it’s true that Honors Students spend the last two weeks of the semester studying, working on projects, and generally avoiding sleeping, sometimes they come outside to touch grass and participate in events that the on-campus activities committee organizes.

This year, that event was a Wiffle Ball tournament that will go down in human history as perhaps the Closest Baseball Game Ever(TM), except perhaps those few games that featured the Texas Rangers in the World Series last year. Of particular note was that Dr. Rukholm squared up against Dr. Tillman, pitting director against director and causing for a potential total meltdown in and dissolution of the Honors Program. They were saved from their toe-to-toe deathmatch by the fact that several of the Honors Program students were also (literal) baseball Allstars who, themselves, know a thing or two about competition and took the game to the next level, with the final inning coming down to a nail-biting 1-point difference.

Although Dr. Rukholm’s team technically won, Dr. Tillman will die on the hill that someone, somewhere cheated and that the game *actually* ended in a perfect tie. Differences were settled over ice cream at Armature Works, where a few scoops of Chill Bros made everyone forget their animosities before returning to their studies.

Symposium: Identifying Mechanisms of Antioxidant Treatment on the Warburg Effect in drug resistant breast cancer by Dr. Kimberly Dobrinski

Dr. Dobrinski presented her research — some of which was alongside Honors students — on breast cancer at the year’s final symposium. Dr. Dobrinski is a professor of Biology at UT. Her area of specialty is Molecular Biology and Genomics with a focus on disease including cancer. In her presentation, she broke down different types of hormone receptors and the treatments assigned patients based on cancer subtypes. Dobrinski’s specific research project concerns drug-resistant cancer cells.