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Hamilton College is situated roughly 30 miles from Green Lake, a rare meromictic lake in Onondaga Country.  This lake is considered special due to the segregated nature of its water and multiple base layers of sediment that have remained preserved over the past thousands of years.  This summer, Kevin Boettger ’14 and Matt Brzustoski ’15 studied the lake with Associate Professor of Biology Michael McCormick to identify its unique characteristics and features.

Director of Interactive Content Strategy Jess Krywosa presented “The Scroll: Hamilton College’s Social Media Strategy and Platform” on July 30 at the eduWeb Conference in Boston.

As one of the original 10 standing committees of the Senate, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is a permanent panel that develops and influences U.S. foreign policy.  For six weeks this summer, Ellen Esterhay ’14 interned with this panel, which supports, debates and challenges treaties and policies from both the president and secretary of state.  Working on Capitol Hill in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Esterhay saw first-hand how foreign policy is developed.

Hong Gang Jin, the William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages & Literature and director of the Associated Colleges in China Program, was one of two guest speakers to present day-long workshops for the Chinese Language Teachers Association’s STARTALK Program on Chinese Literacy.

Studying the concept of infinity can be a daunting task, particularly because it requires approaching the idea from different perspectives. This summer Austin Heath ’15 is taking on that challenge by studying perceptions of infinity within three distinct fields. In his Emerson Foundation project, “Grasping Infinity: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Spiritual Conceptions of Boundlessness,” he is working with advisor John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy Richard Werner to trace the development of human analysis of infinity.

Philip Pearle, professor of physics emeritus, was an invited speaker on May 28 at “The Quantum Landscape,” a conference held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.

Civic engagement is essential to a community’s well-being and can be defined, in part, by citizen participation in after school programs, volunteer opportunities and political causes.  However, the availability of these opportunities differs between high- and low- income areas.  Krista Hesdorfer ’14 is examining the correlation between civic learning and the growing income-based achievement gaps in the U. S. with Director of the Education Studies Program Susan Mason.

At the invitation of the Rockbund Art Museum, Stephen J. Goldberg presented a lecture and conducted a public interview on July 20, at the museum located in the Bund area of Shanghai, China.

The College conducted a large-scale emergency drill on campus on Monday, July 29, the fourth in a series of yearly exercises to ensure that the Hamilton Emergency Response Team (HERT) is proficient in handling emergencies utilizing the Incident Command System (ICS). News coverage of the exercise included news stories produced by WUTR (ABC/Fox affiliate) and WKTV (NBC affiliate) as well as the Observer-Dispatch.

Alan Cafruny, the Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Affairs, was interviewed for an article titled “Student Debt: Crippling for All Ages and Not Going Away Soon” on the FOX Business site on July 29. “The problem of student debt is not just ‘economic’ in the narrow sense,” said Cafruny. “Debt has all kinds of consequences for society: it imposes social discipline, circumscribing young people’s options, making them more acquiescent and conformist in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways.”