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As a kid growing up in Tampa, Fla., Preston Perez ’22 was always close to the water. “My family does a lot of bonding activities around the ocean,” he said. At 10 years old, Perez got his scuba diving certification; a few years later, he began volunteering with the Dagger Dive program of Task Force Dagger, an organization dedicated to helping members of the Special Operations Forces community.

Sara Aldrich’19 is spending the summer doing research in Dr. Alcino Silva’s lab, which is in the UCLA graduate neurobiology department.

Nothing could have prepared Vince Sorrentino ’20 for what it was like to work in a hospital: grumpy patients, serious wound care, and lots of bodily fluids. It was an up close and personal look at hospital work for a student on the job—one of seven Hamilton students participating in a summer program with SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Sara Aldrich ’19, Tatenda Chakoma ’18, Gianna Davino ’20 and Allison Mogul ’18 are studying the behavior of rats to better understand the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry behind learning, memory and motivation.

For Emily Teichman ’18, the study of mood disorders, especially of depression, is a topic of great personal relevance. “I would be hard-pressed to find a person whose life, in some way, whether directly or through a friend or family member, has not been touched by this disease,” she said.

Emily Yong ’19, a neuroscience major, is a runner and activist who found her perfect internship in the highlands of Kenya, one of the running capitals of the world.

Hannah Zucker ’15 and Professor of Biology Herm Lehman represented Hamilton at the 2016 Society for Neuroscience Conference. The meeting took place in San Diego in November.

Khat is a plant that is widely used but also widely debated because of its psychostimulant effects. This summer Leonard Kilekwang ’16 researched the effects of khat (also known as miraa) on mice at the department of Medical Physiology at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. His research will provide important results for people and government organizations trying to determine whether khat is safe.

Hayley Goodrich ’17 is replicating 2015 graduate Carly Poremba’s senior neuroscience thesis this summer in the hopes of contributing to the academic literature and research agenda surrounding binocular rivalry. Goodrich’s project, titled the Binocular Rivalry Study, seeks to test the efficacy of Poremba’s thesis conclusions regarding the postdictive effects of a later stimulus on a previously subconsciously processed stimulus.

Alex Mitko ’16 this summer  is taking the principles he’s learned as a neuroscience major at Hamilton into an internship with the Boston Attention and Learning Lab, a cognitive neuroscience lab located in the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Jamaica Plains, Boston. The BAL Lab conducts research that focuses on “the cognitive and neural mechanisms of attention, as well as the potential for enhancing attention abilities through cognitive training.”