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Patrick Reynolds, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, announced the appointment of new faculty for the 2015-16 academic year, including five tenure-track appointments, 24 visiting professors and instructors, and two teaching fellows. New tenure-track appointments are Catherine Beck, geosciences; Farah Dawood, chemistry; Cynthia Downs, biology; Quincy Newell, religious studies; and Javier Pereira, economics.

Sam Welch ’86 has been appointed director of Hamilton’s Career and Life Outcomes Center. A native of Upstate New York, Welch graduated from Hamilton with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in economics. Over 25 years he built a career in marketing, communications and advertising, acquiring extensive strategic and personnel leadership experience, and establishing a track record of building teams and understanding the needs of diverse stakeholders.

Three Hamilton students, Hannah Ferris ’16, Kate Getman ’16 and Milinda Ajawara ’16 this summer participated in internships at Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, N.Y. Burke Hospital, celebrating its centennial this year, is an acute rehabilitation hospital that has maintained a long-standing relationship with Hamilton College, offering internships yearly to qualified applicants.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Jaime Kucinskas convened a session on the Sociology of Buddhism and presented her research on the diffusion of mindful meditation into secular institutions at the Association for the Sociology of Religion's annual meeting, held in Chicago Aug. 20-22.

Richard Wu ’16 is working this summer on a computer program that reintroduces linguistics to modern cryptography by exploring and combining the two fields’ theoretical backgrounds.

Amelia Heller ’16 is expanding her horizons this summer as an intern at Vimbly, an activities-based booking platform headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. Heller, a Hispanic studies major, discovered this opportunity through research on Craigslist, and was granted funding through the Summer Internship Support Fund, managed by Hamilton's Career and Life Outcomes Center.

Though the human eye processes hundreds of different shades and tones every day, color may not be a subject that is often considered by the average individual. Art major Lily Anne Johnston ’16, however is exploring color theory this summer in order to paint a vivid picture of the Upstate New York area’s regional color history through an Emerson Foundation grant.

Steven Laurent Cunden ’18 is this summer helping to further develop the robotics technologies used in the Physics 245 course, Electronics and Computers. Cunden is working with the class instructor, Associate Professor of Physics Brian Collet, on enabling the relatively simplistic robotic arms used in the course to receive and react to positional feedback.

When people recall what they enjoyed most about science classes – whether  in college, high school or even earlier – chances are they remember hands-on experiments and the excitement of discovering something new for themselves. This element of discovery is important to Thomas Hoffman ’16 and Adam Lark, director of physics laboratories. The two are working together to add more discovery-based elements to introductory physics labs on campus, hoping to improve the learning experience for physics students.

Barbara Tewksbury, the Upson Chair for Public Discourse and Professor of Geosciences, presented “Polygonal Patterns and Desert Eyes: Discovery and Study of Pervasively Developed Bedrock Structures in the Western Desert of Egypt Using Freely Available High Resolution Satellite Imagery” on Aug. 18 at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston.