Over the past several decades, psychologists have placed a growing level of importance on bringing up children with high self-esteem, but according to the research of Beril Esen ’13, Susannah Parkin ’13 and Jose Mendez ’14, a person’s level of self-esteem is not always what it appears to be.

Hamilton’s student researchers are making great strides in the expansive Ich Genome Project, a multi-institutional effort to develop preventative and combative treatments for Ichthyophthirius multifiliis (Ich), also known as white spot disease in fish. Ravi Jariwala ’13 and Rachel Green ’14 are working under the direction of Associate Professor of Biology Wei-Jen Chang and recent graduate Matthew Therkelsen ’12 to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) genetic markers.

Danielle Brockmann ’13 is no novice when it comes to creating theatrical performances. Although she has not yet graduated from Hamilton, she has already founded her own production company, The House of Brockmann, and has written, produced and performed three plays. Brockmann’s fourth work, A Leurs Yeux, will be a result of the hours upon hours of work she has been able to complete thanks to her receipt of an Emerson Summer Research Grant.

Mathew Ha’s ’14 grasp of the North Korean political structure is impressive, especially considering the reclusive nature of the 65-year-old single party state. Ha took inspiration in designing his Emerson Grant summer research project on the 2012 North Korean leadership transition from Hamilton alumnus Jae Yong Kim ’10, whose 2009 Emerson research project studied the role of NGOs in North Korea.

As a physics and philosophy dual concentrator, Emi Birch ’14 has taken an interdisciplinary approach to her education, an approach that is also reflected by her summer research project. Birch is attempting to replicate an experiment conducted by French physicist Jean Foucault in 1851. Foucault hung a 67 meter (about 220 ft.) pendulum from the roof of the Pantheon, in Paris, in order to demonstrate the rotation of the earth.

George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel 1984 famously featured cameras capable of discerning a person’s state of mind – their contentedness, truthfulness or trustfulness – simply by looking at their face. The year 1984 came and went without such a technology emerging, but as demonstrated by Diane Paverman ’13 and Eric Murray’s ’13 summer research on the functional near-infrared spectrometer (fNIRS), scientists are getting closer to achieving Orwellian-like surveillance capabilities.

Pharmaceutical research is usually dominated by corporations and large research universities, but student researchers Hallie Brown ’13, Summer Bottini ’14, Scott Pillette ’14 and Liza Gergenti ’14 are conducting preliminary animal trials on the psychoactive drug Quinpirole as Hamilton undergraduates. They’re studying Quinpirole’s effect on contrafreeloading under the direction of Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Michael Frederick.

Imagine being able to select any written document on a computer and automatically know where the writer struggled, which sections the writer breezed through, and if the writer had plagiarized – all without reading a single word of the document itself. The idea seems simple enough to conceive with the use of text extracting programs and subsequent algorithms, but, surprisingly, no software maker has produced such a product.

The ability to pick up an object without knocking it over is something that most people take for granted, but Emma Geduldig ’13, Sarah Andrews ’14 and John Wildman ’15 are more inquisitive when it comes to movement and motor control. Why, they ask, do we move to pick up a coffee cup from the side as opposed to the front? Such simple questions on human motion have yet to be entirely answered, and these researchers hope to shed more light on this seldom- researched subject.

Max Schnidman ’14 received an Emerson Grant this summer to research virtual marketplaces. Schnidman first became interested in the idea of online markets when he came across the concept in a New York Times article about the video game Diablo III  last August.  According to the Times article, Diablo III would incorporate a virtual “auction house” where players could conduct exchanges between real dollars and in-game currency known as gold. Diablo III’s auction house is the first-ever sanctioned online marketplace where players can engage in real currency exchanges, and Schnidman believes that this development has potential implications for economic and social policy.