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Herm Lehman, associate professor of biology, presented a talk titled “Social regulation of neurotransmitter synthesis” at Neurofest, in Skanetateles, N.Y., in April. Neurofest is an annual meeting of the upstate New York neuroscience community that is attended by faculty and students from Syracuse University, SUNY Upstate Medical Center, Lemoyne University, SUNY Cortland, University of Rochester and Hamilton College. His talk examined the social behavior of honey bees and how the manifestation of this social behavior is regulated by the synthesis of octopamine, a neurotransmitter in the bee brain.

Hamilton College's Class & Charter Day celebration, an annual convocation recognizing student and faculty excellence during the preceding academic year, will take place on Friday, May 4, at 12:15 p.m. in the Chapel. This year's speaker, Hamilton Charter Trustee Susan Skerritt, is a 1977 graduate of Kirkland College. She will present remarks titled “Kirkland Mattered: A Brief Personal Account.” An all-campus picnic will follow the awards and HamTrek, the fourth annual campus triathalon, will begin at 2:30 p.m.

Associate Professor of English Naomi Guttman's new book of poems, Wet Apples White Blood (McGill-Queen's University Press), has been reviewed in ForeWord Magazine. Published six times a year, ForeWord showcases critical reviews of titles from independent book publishers.

Eleven students were inducted into the Hamilton chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, the National Classics Honor Society, on April 30. The Hamilton chapter was established this year. The charter members of the Hamilton chapter of Eta Sigma Phi are Kevin Coppola ’07, Adam Weisz ’07, Rob Dunn ’07, Chrissy Rubino ’08 (president), Nate Miller ’08, Matt Mesi ’08 (secretary), Cassie Sullivan ’09 (vice president), Casey Green ’09 (treasurer), Ashley Langer ’09, Maddie Ware ’09, and Larry Allen ’09 (sergeant-at-arms). The new Hamilton chapter was established by Hamilton Classics Department faculty.

Leanne Pasquini '07 has received the 2007 Undergraduate Student Award from the New York Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. She will be honored at the NYSAS celebration meeting to be held at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on June 17. A Phi Beta Kappa chemistry major, she was nominated by Professor of Chemistry Tim Elgren. He nominated Pasquini for her self-directed project that looked at the Raman spectral features associated with various gemstones. The work was done in collaboration with Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones, Professor of  Geosciences Dave Bailey and Professor Elgren. Pasquini presented a poster on the project titled “Raman Spectroscopic Characterization of Gem Stones” at the Chicago American Chemical Society meeting in April.

Winslow Professor of Chemistry George Shields presented a seminar at Vassar College on April 25, titled "Research on accurate pKa calculations, the role of water clusters in Atmospheric Chemistry, and the use of computational chemistry in Cancer Drug Design." He discussed the work that Hamilton students have done over the past few years, working with him and Karl Kirschner, co-Director of the Center for Molecular Design.

Janis Stout, author of Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times (1995), Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000), the forthcoming Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin, and others, will reflect on the perils of scholarly work at the intersection of biography and close reading of text in a lecture titled, “Biographical Criticism: Neither Fish Nor Fowl but Pretty Good Red Herring,” on Thursday, May 3, at 4:10 p.m. in the Red Pit. This lecture is hosted by the Dean of Faculty office and is presented in conjunction with English 462, Seminar on Willa Cather. This event is free and open to the public.

Associate Professor of English and American Studies Catherine Gunther Kodat contributed a chapter on the work of William Faulkner to the just-released Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel.  Edited by Morag Shiach, professor of cultural history in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel features essays on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Djuna Barnes, and Samuel Beckett, in addition to Kodat's chapter on Faulkner. Published by the U.K.'s Cambridge University Press, the Cambridge Companions are among the world's most highly-regarded guides to literature, featuring erudite yet accessible essays written by experts in the field.

Eight Hamilton students and three faculty participated with about 50 other people in the annual Utica Marsh clean-up, sponsored by the Utica Marsh Council, on April 28. Students who helepd with the clean-up were David Schlifka '09, Louise Roy '10, Diana Di Leonardo '10, Ashley Langer '09, Matt Crowson '09, Michael Zesk '08, Bobby Wysocki '07, and Emma Stewart '09. Hamilton faculty volunteers were Professor of Biology Ernest Williams, Professor of Biology Dave Gapp and Associate Professor of English Onno Oerlemans.

Molly Kane '09 is a member of the Sophomore Seminar class "Global Warming: Is the Day After Tomorrow Sooner Than We Think?" with Professor of Geosciences Gene Domack and Associate Professor of Chemistry Ian Rosenstein. That class, as well as Domack's Antarctica and Global Change class, had the opportunity to participate in a question and answer session with former Vice President Al Gore, who came to Hamilton on April 26 to present his multimedia "An Inconvenient Truth" lecture. Kane here offers her impressions of the classroom session with Mr. Gore.