Facing Goliath together

Alec Santelman ’30 committed to playing football at Bethel and expected the next few months to be filled with the fun and excitement of wrapping up his senior year of high school and looking ahead to college. But everything changed on January 10, 2025. 

Santelman was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma. The cancer was caught early and localized to a soft tissue tumor near his femur. Still, treatment would be demanding: 10 months of intensive chemotherapy, eight weeks of radiation at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and numerous surgeries.

For a while, playing football took a backseat. “My biggest fear was when I didn’t know how advanced or treatable my cancer was—I didn’t know how long I would live,” Santelman says. “My fears began to fade, though, when I realized that, no matter what happened, God was with me.”

Rewind 20 years. Another future Bethel football player faced a remarkably similar experience. Logan Flannery ’11 was a three-sport athlete at Lakeville South High School when he found a lump under his left arm during his junior football season. Initial testing suggested it wasn’t cancer, so he continued playing football and basketball. But when doctors later removed the swollen lymph node, further testing revealed it was cancer—Burkitt lymphoma. Near the end of his junior year, Flannery abruptly left school to begin four months of chemotherapy and radiation.

At 17, Flannery struggled to fully comprehend the diagnosis. His mind kept returning to sports. “My whole concern was like, ‘OK, well, I have this diagnosis of cancer. But when can I go back to normal life and playing football?’” Flannery says. “I think it’s the same for a lot of kids who go through pediatric cancer—they get pulled out of their normal life, and they just want to get back to feeling normal again.”

For Flannery, normal meant getting back to his teammates and competing. When he was home between treatments, he tried to participate in summer football training. He entered remission shortly before practice began for his senior season and returned to the field despite the toll treatment had taken on his body. Chemotherapy and radiation had cost him muscle mass, weight, strength, and mobility. But Flannery kept working. As the season progressed, he began to feel like himself again, and his team at Lakeville South eventually advanced to the state championship game.

“I was happy I could just get back and go out and play football again,” Flannery says. “My passion—and a lot of my identity—was being an athlete.” That season also kept alive his hope of playing college football.

Finding Bethel

Flannery initially considered other schools where he could play college football, but none felt like the right fit. His family knew then-Bethel head football coach Steve Johnson, and with faith central to his family, he decided to give Bethel a closer look.

After spending time with Johnson and the team, something clicked. “The football was there, the faith aspect was there,” Flannery says. “It was close to home, but far enough away from home where I still felt like I was having that college experience.”

He graduated from Bethel in 2011, but the relationships he formed through the football program continued long after his playing days. “It’s such a tight-knit group of guys,” Flannery says. “My college teammates are still some of my best friends, and some were even in my wedding.” At Bethel it wasn’t just about winning, he recalls. Coaches challenged him and his teammates to consider the men they were becoming and the husbands, fathers, and followers of Christ they hoped to be.

Turnquist explains that in IoT, this machine learning—a subfield of artificial intelligence in which computers “learn” what’s normal or abnormal for a certain context—is increasingly important for the safe and efficient incorporation of autonomous technologies into our existing infrastructures. For instance, a hotel might have hundreds of surveillance cameras, Turnquist explains by way of example. “Nobody can possibly look at all that data, but every camera can ‘learn’ what’s normal for its corner. They all remain silent, looking at what they’re always looking at. But if something unusual begins to happen, they can sense that and then show the security team the most relevant feeds,” he says. Courtemanche explains the algorithm is based on recognizing a sudden increase of distance between vectors in a high-dimensional vector space.

In order to test the algorithm in a benign, easily accessible way, Turnquist and Courtemanche installed a webcam in Turnquist’s office window in the Clauson Center (CC). Facing Kresge Courtyard and the path to Nelson Hall, the camera picks up a feed of outdoor foot traffic. “Every single quadrant in the field has its own anomaly detector attached to it,” explains Turnquist. “One might only see blue sky, and they don’t know what the others are seeing. They each just sit there quietly as long as things are normal. But if something enters into that box that it hasn’t seen before, it lights up and says ‘Hey, look at this.’”

Turnquist explains the far-reaching implications of this work, something IT companies have had on their radar for years but that’s only now being developed in earnest. In healthcare, what if a specialist didn’t have to look at every radiology scan? We could do more scans without increasing the workload of radiologists. While there are many exciting implications of this work, there are also potentially worrisome ones. Streamlining data allows for an ever-expanding IoT, which could increase life expectancy and crime-fighting capabilities but also break down personal privacy. “These advancements aren’t inherently positive or negative. They just are. We have to decide whether the implications are exciting or frightening—or both,” says Turnquist. “But this is the beginning of something that—10 years from now—could be a huge part of our lives.”

Courtemanche says the potential of working on research like this—right alongside established faculty members—was something that drew her to Bethel over the larger state school she was considering. “It was a chat with Dr. Turnquist, on a tour of Bethel, that really changed my plan. To be able to have exposure to this kind of research at the undergraduate level has been a game-changer.” This spring, she’s working with Turnquist on getting this project published, and then she’s turning her sights on her post-Bethel plans: a Best Semester program at Oxford, studying logic. “It’s closely related to math. I love the formal logic and philosophy of mathematics. I see this as a great way of broadening my skills on a subject I already love. Then it’s grad school, maybe out east. Wherever the research is interesting!”

Courtemanche’s future in mathematics is bright, but for her, the journey has been as rewarding as the progress made toward her goals. On this particular project, her skills and Turnquist’s were complementary, but they shared a deep excitement over their findings. Courtemanche remembers one particularly exciting breakthrough moment when she and Turnquist stopped and said to one another, “I love math. Math is so cool!”