Sixty-five Hamilton students have each been awarded $3,500 stipends to conduct research in the sciences and mathematics at Hamilton College during the summer of 2002. The students receiving awards were chosen in a highly competitive process from the largest group of candidates in the College's history. Summer research applicants write research proposals and seek faculty sponsors to guide their projects for 10 weeks over the summer. A committee reviews the applications and awards stipends based on the merit of the proposals. This summer, 23 professors from eight academic departments will serve as mentors for 65 student research projects.
The flourishing summer science research program is a reflection of Hamilton's emphasis on "hands on" science and highlights the close student/faculty interaction and collaborative investigation that are at the heart of a Hamilton education. Science instruction at Hamilton is active and creative. The dynamic summer program has resulted in numerous papers published with students as the first author and several prominent post-graduate fellowships. More importantly, the program has fired the enthusiasm of scores of students who discovered the joys of scientific discovery and independent learning early in their undergraduate years.
Matt Liptak, a junior from Westborough, Massachusetts, spent the summers after his first and second years conducting research at Hamilton. This week Matt learned that his fifth paper has been accepted for publication and that he has been named a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar. The scholarship is the premier national undergraduate award in the fields of the natural sciences and mathematics. Matt has presented two posters at the Sanibel Symposium, an international conference of over 300 scientists from throughout the world.
The outstanding work completed by students in the summers after their first and second years at Hamilton inspired the faculty (all of whom guide summer research without financial compensation) to offer the research opportunity to students who were about to enter Hamilton for their first year of college study. The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and Hamilton College fund these pre-college grants.
Emma Pokon, one example, was an outstanding student at a small high school in rural New York. She was interested in science and by the time she enrolled at Hamilton in the fall of 2000, she had already spent five weeks working in a chemistry laboratory. She continued her research project in the summer of 2001 and completed a study that was essential to the overall goals of the laboratory. The research was published, with Emma as the first author, in the Journal of Physical Chemistry last September.
Student stipend support for the summer research program at Hamilton College is provided by grants from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, the Merck Company Foundation and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the GE Fund, the Sergei S. Zlinkoff Foundation for Medical Education, and the Ralph E. Hansmann Science Students Support Fund. Additional grant support is provided by Hamilton College from the Dean's Grant Support Fund and the President's Fund for Faculty Innovation (Ferguson-Seeley). Individual science professors provide additional support from grants they have been awarded from the National Institute of Health, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the Petroleum Research Fund, New York State Department of Health, Research Corporation, and the National Science Foundation.
