Although Nicholas Yepes ’15 had traveled to Paraguay just three years ago, he was nonetheless surprised by the precarious state of the indigenous migrant population upon his arrival in the capitol city of Asunción this year. He is seeing some of the most economically depressed areas of Paraguay as he studies how best to meet the basic needs of indigenous migrants through a Levitt Research Fellowship.

Assistant Professor of Biology Wei-Jen Chang and his thesis students, Tani Leigh ’12 and Matthew Therkelsen ’12, presented during the Protist2012 conference held July 29-Aug. 3 at the University of Oslo in Norway.

A picture may be worth 1000 words, but Kathleen Herlihy ’14 is only looking to find a few, albeit in a very literal sense. She is studying the use of sign language in art, a topic which she says has yet to be comprehensively analyzed by any scholarly work. She received an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant to pursue an initial scholarly analysis on this subject under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Erich Fox Tree.

Creative writing concentrator Martin Cain’s poetry has already appeared in a number of literary journals, so his award of an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant to pursue a study focused on “pastoral” poetry should come as no surprise. Cain ’13 was also the youngest writer to attend Middlebury College’s prestigious Bread Loaf Conference in 2011.

Pauline Wafula ’13 became interested in HIV/AIDS research after writing a paper on anti-retroviral treatments of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Wafula, an economics major, has been awarded a Levitt Summer Research Fellowship to pursue further HIV/AIDS research with a focus on women in her native Kenya under the guidance of Associate Professor of Economics Stephen Wu.

Learning English is one of the most daunting tasks for newly arriving immigrants in the United States, and it can be a task that is accompanied by little support. Anna Zahm’13, Grace Parker Zielinski ’14 and Melissa Segura ’14, have spent their summers working to combat this problem by providing much-needed assistance to English language adult students at the Utica access site for the Madison-Oneida Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).

Rob Clayton ’15 and Leah Krause ’14 presented their research at the 11th Molecular Educational Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational chemistRY (MERCURY) conference at Bucknell University. Both students have been working this summer in the laboratory of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe.

Adriana Fracchia ’14 was awarded an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant to assist John and Anne Fischer Professor in Fine Arts John McEnroe in conducting one of only three officially sanctioned U.S. excavations in Greece. Fracchia is working to draft a topographical map of the ancient village of Gournia, on Crete, as a continuation of the work done by Caroline Morgan ’13 in 2011.

Daniel Mermelstein ’14 is conducting research this summer on a protein produced by the fetus, alpha-fetoprotein, that might hold the key to a reduction in breast cancer.

At the end of their summer research, students from Hamilton, Colgate University. and Hobart and William Smith Colleges who did projects in organic chemistry gathered at Hamilton to present their results in a symposium on July 25. Each student spoke for 15 minutes and then responded to questions. A cookout at the Babbitt Pavilion followed.