“It is a sacred thing to be able to help young people figure out who they are and what they can be,” Thom Klepach said. Klepach is a non-tenure-track lecturer in the College’s Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Department.
Klepach moved frequently while growing up. “I had a very tumultuous childhood and lived in a lot of different places,” he said. “But the place I would [call home] would be Detroit, Michigan.”
After graduating from a Jesuit high school in Detroit, Klepach took an unconventional path through higher education. “My education is a wild story – I didn’t really start college in earnest until I was 20.” He then attended medical school while working on his dissertation and serving as a teaching assistant in a medical school cadaver lab.
As a graduate student, Klepach was a “theoretical carbohydrate biophysicist,” using “a bunch of computations to interpret the structural properties of complex carbohydrates.” His research also led him to questions about consciousness: “Are there scientific models that can help us understand how it is that an organism can be conscious?”
Klepach joined the College in 2012 with his wife, Denise Bruesewitz, and took a different path from his research. “I never wanted to have tenure here at Colby,” he says. “I sort of like what I do. I get to teach, and have a little more freedom, so I teach a lot of interesting classes.”
That freedom shapes Klepach’s approach to teaching in the STS Department. “For me, the students are the most important thing,” Klepach said. He describes college as “the peak of humanity,” where students encounter ideas that are “fresh and unique.”
“So much of our existence outside this realm is a little bit mundane,” he says. College, by contrast, allows students to discover “these kinds of eternal truths” for the first time. Klepach enjoys watching students have “those aha moments” as they grow and find themselves.
Stella Reynaga `28, a biology and STS double major, sees that energy in Klepach’s classroom. “Professor Klepach brings a sense of energy and purpose to the classroom,” she said. “He makes learning feel experiential and genuinely fun while consistently connecting lecture to real-world relevance… I am proud to say that he is the reason why I became so passionate about the STS major.”
Klepach wants his students to understand science beyond facts and formulas and consider its social consequences. “Science cannot be done properly without a grounding in an ethic and an understanding of the sociological impacts, the context leading up to and the consequence, and the downstream consequence of the scientific work,” he said. “All people need to be and should be able to understand science that relates to their lives,” he said, “at least with a qualitative sense.”
For Klepach, this interdisciplinary approach shows the purpose of a liberal arts education. He uses food as an example: understanding it can require biology, biochemistry, economics, agriculture, and government policy. “You can, like, look at one narrow wedge of it, but that narrow wedge of it is like you’re putting blinders on and you’re not actually seeing the whole picture,” he said.
Rather than becoming “technicians” within a single field, students can develop a broader perspective. “That’s what leaders are,” Klepach says. “One of the traits of a leader is being able to have a very wide perspective, a broad perspective, that understands how particulars affect the total, the whole.”
Ultimately, Klepach’s journey has led him to a profound understanding: “Be grateful that you are alive and here and able to connect with other people.”
“We are here to understand what it means to be alive and to be aware in this space with other beings that are also alive and aware,” Klepach said. “Understanding how sacred [life] is is gonna fulfill you… You’re gonna meet your human potential.”
~ Summer Woo `28
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