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Language is undoubtedly a fundamental aspect of many human interactions. For this reason, the study of language serves a vital purpose in neuroscience, medicine, and even everyday life. Sarah Kane ’12 and Amanda O’Brien ’13 are spending their summer researching language and the brain under Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy Skipper. The group is working to disprove the classical model of language processing and to discover more about how language is processed in the human brain.

Professor of English Onno Oerlemans presented a paper titled “Poetry as Field-Guide: Can you Capture a Ptarmigan in a Poem?” at a conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) on June 24 at the University of Indiana.

The Great Recession left a deep mark on the American economy, most notably on the labor market. While this market is recovering, progress is very slow and many Americans remain in search of a job. Furthermore, current labor market trends are highly unexpected, leaving many economists looking for a definitive explanation. Mihai Dohotaru ’13, a recipient of a Summer Levitt Research Fellowship Grant, will work toward the answer with Professor of Economics Christophre Georges over the course of his project “The Housing Bubble and the U.S. Labor Market after the ‘Great Recession.’”

Recent Hamilton graduate Noah Bishop ’11 will soon begin a job in the offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Stamford, Conn. Bishop, who graduated with a degree in philosophy and economics, will be working in financial analysis.

Alex De Moor '10 recently completed more than a month of field work in Namibia working on the Neoproterozoic glacigenic rocks of the Otavi Platform. Among other results of the field work were the collection and discovery of perhaps some of the earliest forms of animal fossils every found, that his team uncovered these unusual forms at the base of the Ediacaran section right above a prominent glacial layer known as a tillite.

Computer programming, and specifically natural language processing, has the potential to decode sentence structure and organize immense quantities of information. This summer, Richard Klockowski ’12 is working with Associate Professor of Computer Science Alistair Campbell with aspirations to automatically extract information from Pubmed’s database of medical research papers.

Fluorescent materials have important implications for modern technologies. However, the study of fluorescence can be a complex and precise matter. This summer, Erin Bessette-Kirton ’12, a physics major with minors in math and geology, will work with Professor of Physics Ann Silversmith to investigate the structure of terbium in doped sol-gel glass and the terbium concentration’s effect on fluorescence decay.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Nicole L. Snyder has received fellowships from the Max Planck Society and Deutscher Akademisher Austausch Dienst (DAAD) to support her collaborations this summer with world renowned carbohydrate chemist Peter H. Seeberger at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Colloids and Interfaces, Department of Biomolecular Systems in Berlin, Germany.

By teaching children sustainable, environmentally-friendly practices, educators make strides toward changing the future for the better. At summer camps, for example, children can learn about sustainable farming while exploring the world around them and breathing fresh air. Sarah Gamble ’13 will spend the summer as an intern for Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vt., where she will help run a series of camps. She is supported by the Joseph F. Anderson ’44 Internship Fund.

De Bao Xu, professor of Chinese, was invited to give a talk at ICICE7, the 7th International Conference on Internet Chinese Education,  in Taipei, Taiwan, June 17-19. His talk was titled “The Participatory and Interactive Online Tools and the Standards to Choose Virtual Classroom Software.”