Education Department

Meet Our Alumni

• <span class="lw_item_thumb"><a href="/live/profiles/697-martha-emrey" title="Martha Emrey" aria-label="Martha Emrey"><img src="/live/image/gid/2/width/345/height/225/crop/1/src_region/0,0,690,390/347_0ba05b8f7f8e711eb72231e03ad47a65_f1834.rev.1500317248.jpg" alt="Martha Emrey" title="Martha Emrey" class="lw_image" width="345" height="225" data-max-w="690" data-max-h="390"/></a></span><div class="lw_widget_text"><h4 class="lw_profiles_headline"><a href="/live/profiles/697-martha-emrey"><p> Martha Emrey Exemplifies Liberal Arts</p></a></h4><div class="lw_profiles_description"><p> When you ask Martha Winquist Emrey (’79) about her busy, service-filled life, she humbly responds, “I do what I can.” But the real story is that you can’t believe what all she can do.</p><p> For starters, she owns and runs her own business. TOPCO is a fascinating enterprise as it handles the tasks most of us don’t think about. Martha deals in “materials handling,” and, as she puts it, “materials of any size: from donuts to earth excavators!” She’s about the business of helping manufacturing companies handle issues involved with lifting, transporting, and storage. Her company helps solve issues relating to ergonomics and dealing with items of a tricky size, shape, or weight. In short, TOPCO will solve the problems that make folks scratch their heads.</p><p> So when a customer has a question, she meets with them to “see” the challenge, sketches out a possible design, and then shares it with a local business who can fabricate the item in question. To illustrate her work, here’s how she explains a recent opportunity: “…a customer emailed with a need for a custom cart designed to move furniture through a finishing process. The cart would be pulled through the factory by an in-floor conveyor. Since the furniture is tall, the cart would need to have a low profile. I walked through the factory from the start of the process through each step and finally to packing of the item and then the return of the cart back to the starting point. I talked with the Operations Manager, Plant Manager, Engineering Director, Vice President of Operations and the Research & Development Manager, asking questions, getting answers, and getting ideas and input from each one. Back at my office, I compiled all of the information, emailed a sketch to my fabricator and conferred with him by phone. (In the old days we would have met in person.)” She says the design process has to be a group effort as she works with the customer and the fabricator who build the item needed. And because each job is different, each job means in-depth research, fresh ideas, and creative solutions. “It’s always something new!”</p><p> Another client needed a pallet rack to store items received on wooden pallets. Another company, with visually impaired workers, needed the mechanism for measuring, cutting, and shipping steel wire rope. These are the sort of challenges TOPCO takes on and solves.</p><p> And it’s just the sort of work you’d expect an elementary education major to be doing.</p><p> Or not.</p><p> After finishing at E&H the teaching market was crowded, so she returned to a summer job in Wisconsin at a chemical company. She ended up staying there for 10 years enjoying a wide range of experiences working with industrial coatings, doing product evaluations, and trouble-shooting.</p><p> Eventually Wisconsin weather got the best of her and she found a home in warmer North Carolina. She saw that getting a new start meant getting some new skills, so she went to business school to put some new arrows in her quiver. What she really wanted to do next was communications work, and her new business knowledge allowed her to get her foot in the door as a temp worker. Eventually she ended up doing corporate advertising for Ingersoll-Rand. And now she’s running her own business working with industry.</p><p> So, now this teacher-turned-industrial-problem-solver doesn’t settle for a busy career that helps people work more efficiently. She also spends a great amount of her time in service to the community.</p><p> She says the best thing she does all week is leading a program at the local assisted living home. Every Monday for the past 12 years or so she has gone to visit these older residents and offered an intellectually stimulating discourse on music, poetry, literature, biography, song, and more. Recently she did a program on the music of Richard Rogers that allowed for song, stories, and biography. And she offers programs on a variety of musical styles from show tunes to bluegrass. A former member of the E&H Concert Choir, she is likely to sing for them while also sharing wonderful insight into a poet or songwriter. Ironically, she is currently taking voice lessons from Marianne Grzywacz in Greensboro (a former E&H music professor).</p><p> Martha also translates her love of hiking into service as she serves as a trail volunteer for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC). She met her husband of 15 years while on a hike with her hiking club, and now the two share time together doing trail maintenance in a variety of locations.</p><p> She is also a writer of note, and uses her writing as a means of service. She frequently is published in the newsletter for her writers group and the ATC magazine, often using articles to bring attention to organizations, museums, or locations that need a bit of publicity. She recently wrote for the ATC publication about the Settler’s Museum in Atkins, Virginia.<br/> Her interests don’t end there. She also enjoys biking, works on the gardens and grounds at her church, helps her mom volunteer for a wildlife rehabilitation facility in Wisconsin, is learning to knit, and is an available friend and aid to folks in her community.</p><p> She describes herself as having “…a helping personality. I do what I can.” Good luck figuring out what she can’t do.</p></div><a href="/live/profiles/697-martha-emrey" class="link-with-arrow gold">Keep reading</a></div>
• <span class="lw_item_thumb"><a href="/live/profiles/155-ken-noe" title="Ken Noe" aria-label="Ken Noe"><img src="/live/image/gid/2/width/345/height/225/crop/1/src_region/0,0,450,490/27_abe1975e59116cf763b1821b22668003_f74661.rev.1491319536.jpg" alt="Ken Noe" title="Ken Noe" class="lw_image" width="345" height="225" data-max-w="450" data-max-h="490"/></a></span><div class="lw_widget_text"><h4 class="lw_profiles_headline"><a href="/live/profiles/155-ken-noe"><p> Dr. Ken Noe ’79 Writing Book on the Weather’s Impact on the American Civil War</p></a></h4><div class="lw_profiles_description"><p> When Dr. Ken Noe (’79) was growing up in Elliston he remembers that weather played a huge role in the work done on his grandfather’s farm. “If rain was coming, we dropped everything else to put up hay.” He thinks this experience planted a seed in the back of his mind about the impactful influence of weather. Later, his interest in weather grew when he took a geography course at Emory & Henry with Dr. Ed Bingham.</p><p> But even he could never have predicted that he would now be writing a two-volume book on weather’s impact on the American Civil War.</p><p> Ken is the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. He is the author or editor of seven books, and he has published scads of articles, essays and chapters about the Civil War. He is a decorated history professor serving at West Georgia College before heading to Auburn. He was a Pulitzer Prize entrant and won the 2003 Kentucky Governor’s award, the 2002 Peter Seaborg Book Award for Civil War Non-fiction, and the 1997 Tennessee History Book Award. He has won several teaching awards, has served as president of the Alabama Historical Association, and is serving on the Advisory Board of the Society of Civil War Historians. He has even been a consultant for the NBC series <em>Who Do You Think You Are? </em></p><p> But in all his prolific writing and research and publishing even he is surprised that his biggest and most industrious work to-date will be about weather.  “Meteorologists are still trying to work out why the weather during the Civil War was so unusual. They dealt with incredibly snowy and rainy winters and droughts in the summer that affected Southern food supplies. There were dust storms, flooded rivers, and only two hurricanes. It had a profound effect on many campaigns.”</p><p> His research on weather has already taken several years, and he still has a few years left before he publishes. And even he was amazed to realize just how much information he had accumulated. “Very little has been written about Civil War environmental history. It is only now becoming part of the conversation about Civil War history.”  </p><p> Ken says that even in a field of study like Civil War history where so many things have been written, there is still new area for research and a lot of topics that haven’t been covered.  He has grad students asking new questions about the role of religion, the prison industries during the war, the role of friendship, and one young man, who is an E&H grad, is looking into camp life.</p><p> Even though we have just passed the 150^th anniversary of the American Civil War, Ken points out that this conflict still has implications for current events; and he marvels that most conversations over the past 18 months have quickly moved from history to current topics like the Confederate flag, U.S. prisons, and race relations. He says his field has gotten so tangled with politics that there is a declining interest in Civil War history among the public. “But this event still has much to teach us. It was a great turning point in American History and opened up questions that are still being answered about equality of humankind, the status of women, states’ rights. I don’t know how we can answer all these questions unless we go back to the beginning.” He consistently stresses to his students the importance of going back to primary source information rather than depending on how the stories have been told and passed down.</p><p> Ken actually majored in education at Emory & Henry and still remembers panicking when he realized he didn’t want to be a junior high school teacher. “I had a lot of electives leftover and started taking history classes late in my college experience. I realized what I wanted to be was a historian and teach at a higher level.” A conversation with Patsi Trollinger (’72) reassured him that most alumni do not stick to work within their major. And a conversation with Dr. Gene Rasor in the history department led to a phone call which ended with Dr. Rasor telling Ken he had an interview with the history department at Virginia Tech.</p><p> The rest, as they say, is history.</p></div><a href="/live/profiles/155-ken-noe" class="link-with-arrow gold">Keep reading</a></div>
• <span class="lw_item_thumb"><a href="/live/profiles/690-chris-whitt" title="Chris Whitt" aria-label="Chris Whitt"><img src="/live/image/gid/2/width/345/height/225/crop/1/src_region/0,0,450,299/340_195154692a4a9ca21aec2fe00c319ccd_f7172.rev.1500309442.jpg" alt="Chris Whitt" title="Chris Whitt" class="lw_image" width="345" height="225" data-max-w="450" data-max-h="299"/></a></span><div class="lw_widget_text"><h4 class="lw_profiles_headline"><a href="/live/profiles/690-chris-whitt"><p> It’s all Emory & Henry’s Fault</p></a></h4><div class="lw_profiles_description"><p> “While I was a student, I participated in a teaching abroad program in Brazil that was offered by the college, and I fell in love with the Brazilian culture and people. So I decided to make it my home.” So for 7 years he ran a school that taught English as a second language, and in 2008 he opened his very own such business in Londrina, Brazil, called High School Language Center.  Solving more than one need for the community, his school gives families a chance for constructive child care. “My school offers an alternative to a babysitter for families who think learning another language is important. The kids from ages 2 1/2 and up study 3 hours per day at my school. They have a lot of fun learning.” Look for his school online and you’ll find projects like mystery movies his students produce to practice their English.</p><p> Chris is just one of many alumni who are using their E&H degrees to solve problems. If you know a student who might like to use education to make the world a better place, check out the <a href="https://www.ehc.edu/ampersand/">Ampersand</a> project at Emory & Henry!</p></div><a href="/live/profiles/690-chris-whitt" class="link-with-arrow gold">Keep reading</a></div>