Six Hamilton students and two biology faculty members participated in the 2011 Northeast Natural History Conference held at the Empire State Convention Center in Albany, N.Y., on April 7. The group made six poster presentations based on summer and senior thesis research.

Taylor Adams '11 and Deborah Barany '11 have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. Adams, a chemistry major, and Barany who is majoring in neuroscience, will both receive a three-year annual stipend of $30,000 and a $10,500 cost-of -education allowance for tuition and fees, and the freedom to conduct their own research at any accredited U.S. or foreign institution of graduate education they choose.

Connor Brown ’12 and Julia Litzky ’12 have been named Barry M. Goldwater Scholars for the 2011-12 academic year. They are among 275 scholars from across the U.S. to receive the Goldwater, the premier national undergraduate award in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering.

Jennifer L. Thompson ’11 and Heather D. Parker ’11 presented posters at the Northeastern/North-Central Geological Society of America Joint Section Meeting held in Pittsburgh on March 22. Both were in the Geologic Education session of the conference.

Hamilton seniors Mary Phillips, Nathan Schneck and Julia Wilber have been awarded prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships for 2011-12. Phillips’ project is titled “Safe Spaces: All-Girl Environments and Their Role in Community Development”; Schneck will pursue “Voluntary Poverty: A Means for Individual and Community Transformation”; and Wilber received the Watson  for her project “A Single Thread: Producers and Consumers of Fair Trade Clothing.”

Charlotte Hickey ’11 has been awarded a Fulbright grant to Germany. She will spend the 2011-12 academic year at Ludwig-Maximilians –Universitat of Munich, researching the roles of nurses at former euthanasia site Kaufbeuren and their transition back into German society. She hopes to understand the impact of outside forces on the evolution of post-war German society and in particular the role of the early encounters between Germans and Americans and will investigate their initial interactions.

Four physics majors - Anne Vilsoet '11, Sarah Fobes '12, Erin Bessette-Kirton '12 and Eliza Jonathan '13 - attended the the fourth annual Northeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, held Jan. 14 – 16 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Vilsoet and Fobes both presented posters based on research they did at Hamilton. Vilsoet's poster was titled "Simulating Type Ia Supernovae Rise-Time Curves" and Fobes presented "Porosity Reduction in rare earth doped sol-gel glasses."

Louis Boguchwal ’12 and Dan Kamenetsky ’11 presented posters detailing the results of research they conducted last summer, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) held Jan. 6-9, in New Orleans.

Hamilton seniors Drew Christ and Theresa Allinger attended the Fall 2010 American Geophysical Union Meeting in December in San Francisco and presented posters highlighting their research.

Daniel Feinberg ’12 presented the results of his original research on Permeable Reactive Barriers, systems that can remove nitrate pollution from groundwater, on Dec. 17, at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass. Feinberg was one of 16 students from around the country who spent the fall semester in the MBL Semester in Environmental Sciences (SES) program.