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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.

The volume, Ezra Pound and Education, co-edited by Professor of English Steve Yao, was recently published by the National Poetry Foundation. The idea for this collection originated at a conference co-hosted by Hamilton College and Colgate University in 2005 observing the centenary of Pound's graduation from the College. 

Jason Mariasis looked at 25 liberal arts schools before he found Hamilton. It was a perfect fit right away—he applied Early Decision. Four years later as a new Hamilton graduate, he has found another perfect fit at Capital One Financial’s Digital Strategies group, where he will be employed beginning this summer.

Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu organized the Seventh International Conference and Workshops on Technology and Chinese Language Teaching in the 21st Century (TCLT7) held May 25-27 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). Co-sponsored by Hamilton College and UHM, the main themes of the conference were cloud computing and mobile technology and their application to technology-based language instruction.

Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin organized a mini-symposium at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on Discrete Mathematics in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her mini-symposium brought together 10 mathematicians to speak about their work on graph networks and their symmetries. 

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.

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Comparative Literature, was a guest lecturer in a week-long seminar at New York University (NYU) on “Troubling Talk from Antiquity Onward: Sensitive Topics in the Classroom.”

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate guest-edited the June 2012 issue of the journal CrossCurrents (Wiley-Blackwell). The issue theme is "The Mediation of Meaning," and includes articles by scholars and artists working in museum studies, art and religious studies. 

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.