Hope College is on the eve of its 163rd academic year, with the members of the incoming Class of 2028 arriving on Thursday, Aug. 22, for the start of New Student Orientation that evening.
The rest of the students will begin to return on Saturday, Aug. 24. The Opening Convocation marking the formal start of the school year will be on Sunday, Aug. 25, at 2 p.m., in the Concert Hall of the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts, with Dr. Brooke Odle, assistant professor of engineering, as the featured speaker. Classes begin on Monday, Aug. 26.
Attendance at the Opening Convocation is limited to Hope faculty and staff, and the college’s new students. The event is being livestreamed for others at hope.edu/live and the college’s YouTube channel.
The students are arriving and classes are getting underway a day earlier in the week than in years past. Beginning this year, Hope is starting fall-semester classes on a Monday instead of a Tuesday, a change that enables the college to extend Thanksgiving Break to include the Wednesday before the holiday, providing students with more time to travel home. Thanksgiving Break will run Wednesday-Sunday, Nov. 27-Dec. 1.
Odle, who is a biomedical engineer, joined the Hope faculty in 2020 after a year at the college as a faculty fellow. Her research focuses on biomechanics and assistive technology for injury prevention. She has had multiple publications in refereed scientific journals and has made presentations about her research at national meetings of professional associations, and has received a variety of external grants in support of her research. She mentors Hope students who pursue engineering research, and teaches courses including Engineering Computing, Biomechanical Systems, Dynamic Systems Laboratory and Mechanics of Materials Laboratory.
In 2021, she received an “Up and Comer” Award from the American Society of Biomechanics, and Hope named her a Towsley Research Scholar in 2023. She is active in the campus community, with her service to the college including leading the breakout session “What Are You Doing for Others?” during Hope’s Civil Rights Celebration Week this past January and serving as a panelist during a screening of the documentary “Coded Bias” as part of the college’s commemoration of national Black History Month in February 2022.
She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a Bachelor of Science degree in bioengineering in 2006. She went on to complete a Master of Science degree in biomedical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2009; and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University Biomedical and Health Sciences in 2014.
From 2015 through 2019, Odle was a postdoctoral scholar and fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. She conducted research in the Motion Study Laboratory at the Advanced Platform Technology Center at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center. She is a member of the American Society of Biomechanics, Black Biomechanists Association and Biomedical Engineering Society.