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While Hamilton students seem to scatter across the globe every summer, Anna Do ’18 is staying close to home and delving into the issue of sex trafficking in the United States. Funded through a Levitt Center grant, Do seeks to raise awareness and create a safe space for survivors of sex trafficking in her native Syracuse, N.Y.

The Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center recently announced the 2016 Levitt Summer Research Fellows. To enhance student research around issues of public affairs, the Levitt Center funds student-faculty research through its Levitt Research Fellows Program. The program is open to rising juniors and seniors who wish to spend the summer working in collaboration with a faculty member on an issue related to public affairs.

Now back on campus this fall for his junior year Alexandru Hirsu ’17 spent his summer exploring the impact that cooperation with the European Union has had on corruption in Romania through a Levitt Center Summer Research Fellowship. Hirsu, along with the Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Affairs Alan Cafruny, will present on their findings during this fall’s Family Weekend.

Though traveling through Italy enjoying wine-tastings and local delicacies may sound like a simply ideal vacation, Emily Moschowits ’16 is taking what she’s learned this summer in the food and wine capital of the Mediterranean and applying it to Hamilton’s own local community. Moschowits is in the final stages of a food-studies project, funded through the Levitt Center, addressing methods of promoting local sustainable food in the Upstate New York area.

Sexual assault is a significant problem on college campuses. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted while they are in college. This summer, Corinne Smith ’17 is using a Levitt Summer Research Fellowship to assess sexual violence at Hamilton.

While students, faculty, staff and visitors to Hamilton know that the Mohawk Valley is a beautiful and engaging place to live, another striking feature of the area is its position as a cultural and ethnic melting pot, thanks in large part to the City of Utica’s diverse refugee and immigrant populations. Tanapat Treyanurak ’17 is spending his summer continuing work related to Project SHINE, a program dedicated to assisting in the incorporation and assimilation of immigrants and refugees into local communities, through a Levitt Center grant.

When most of us think about oral health, we might not think far beyond brushing our teeth and our next trip to the dentist’s office. James Robbins ’16, however, knows that there’s much more to it than that. This summer as a Levitt Summer Research Fellow he is researching water fluoridation for improved public health. Working closely with Professor of Biology Herm Lehman, Robbins has been researching the public health debate about water fluoridation.

Although globally humans rely mostly on agriculture as a source of sustenance, farmers around the world are not on equal footing. Eren Shultz ’15 is particularly aware of this disparity “having both grown up in rural Wisconsin and spent significant amounts of time traveling and living abroad in small agrarian villages in Eastern Africa.” Shultz said he was both “fascinated and concerned” with “the differences in mechanization and lifestyles” between those communities.

While many students undertake research projects over the summer, Rachael Feuerstein ’16 is using her vacation to pursue a particularly charged subject of study: the social psychology behind the Holocaust. Her project, "The Psychology of Evil and Perpetration: A Psychological Analysis of Why and How the Holocaust Happened," under the direction of Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven and funded through a Levitt Center grant, “aims to explain why ‘good’ people do bad things, or more generally, why people can do evil, such as commit mass genocide.”

John McEnroe, the John and Anne Fischer Professor in Fine Arts, is co-leader of a team that is working on a complete architectural survey of the town of Gournia on the island of Crete. The work was highlighted in a lengthy article in the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine. “The Minoans of Crete” focused on site excavation that began more than a century ago.