George Mason The Pulse

The Schar School offers classes at George Mason University’s Fairfax and Mason Square Campuses in Virginia. Both campuses are located within the heart of a dynamic region and close to the nation’s capital. Opportunities for internships, jobs, and research are unequaled, as is access to archives and museums, policymakers and think tanks, and diverse career choices. With 90 full-time faculty, we offer 14 degree programs across undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels. A Dynamic Education for an Evolving World WWW.SCHAR.GMU.EDU To read The Pulse online, scan here:

4400 University Drive Fairfax, Virginia 22030

PARTING SHOTS

T he Last Consort: Beginning in 1922, Isabel Mayer , far right, began a long service as a consort to Wan Jung , the bride of the Qing Dynasty’s Henry Puyi , the last royal emperor of China. Mayer was the empress’s English tutor and tennis instructor; her husband William was a U.S. military attaché at the Peking Embassy. The couple lived for decades amid the grandeur of palaces, silk robes, and whispered wartime secrets during the Sino-Japanese conflict. In March, Schar School associate professor Jeremy Mayer , the consort’s grandson, attended a ceremony in Guangzhou acknowledging the family’s donation of a trove of letters, documents, and photographs of historic importance.

H ands-on Learning: Biodefense graduate students visited a truly altogether different place in May when they took a field trip to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland. In addition to viewing tape worm-infected livers, preserved kidney stones, and other exhibits of diseased human anatomy, the students were offered a chance to handle human organs. But why? “This glimpse back in history shows how far we've come for treatments on the battlefield, and what threats they faced in the past,” said Lauren E. Quattrochi , the adjunct professor in the biodefense program best known as “Dr. Q.” From left, Brendan Karlstrand with a plasticized human brain, Janard Bleach with a kidney, Geoffrey Mattoon with a brain hemisphere, and Becca Earnhardt with a heart. —Buzz McClain