All News

Chemistry major Marco Allodi ’08 (Oriskany, N.Y.) is busy this summer, multi-employed in the lab of George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry. Allodi is working on two very different projects. The first deals with atmospheric reaction kinetics and pre-reactive complexes while the other is an attempt to model ene-diyene anti-cancer drugs.

Niels Lesniewski ’07 (Stonington, Conn.) grew up hearing his grandparents tell stories about the hurricane which, in 1938, destroyed New England. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, Lesniewski thought of the stories he’d been told; “part of me was thinking, that could very well be my hometown too.”

Sharfi Farhana ’09 (West Haven, Conn.), a former STEP/Dreyfus program participant, returned to research this summer to work with George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner on computational chemistry research.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Richard Seager recently completed a summer course in Curanderismo, traditional Nahua-Mexican folk healing, co-sponsored by the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, La Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos, Mexico; and El Centro de Desarrollo Humano hacia La Communidad. Research included study with university academics and traditional healers from Mexico, Guatemala and Bolivia. This work is part of his on-going research on religion and culture of the Mexican-American borderlands.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons published an article in the June 2006 issue of Mobilization: The International Quarterly Review of Research in Social Movements, Protest, and Contentious Politics. It is a special issue on repression and the social control of protest. Her article is titled "Who Rules the Social Control of Protest?: Variability in the State-Countermovement Relationship." It examines the variable relationship between a state organization that tried to maintain segregation during the Civil Rights Movement, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and a citizen-led countermovement that tried to do the same, the White Citizens' Councils.

Professor of History Maurice Isserman wrote a review of the new book, Timothy Leary: A Biography, by Robert Greenfield for the Chicago Tribune (July 2, 2006). Isserman wrote: "In 'Timothy Leary: A Biography,' Robert Greenfield (a former associate editor of Rolling Stone magazine and author of a well-received biography of Jerry Garcia) has written a book that combines the serious probing of cultural history with the compulsive readability of celebrity biography."  In the review Isserman says Leary  "became one of the most famous Americans of his generation as an exponent of personal liberation, spiritual discovery, the politics of ecstasy--and the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD." Isserman is an historian of 20th-century U.S., particularly the 1960s. An expert on reform and radical movements, he is widely acknowledged to be the preeminent historian of the American left. Isserman is co-author with Michael Kazin of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.

Professor of Government Theodore Eismeier is participating in the River Summer program of the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities from July 6 through July 29. Eismeier will join faculty from more than half of the 44 member institutions aboard the R/V Seawolf, a research vessel operated by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, to learn about the development of the Hudson and its watershed while preparing curriculum units for their courses. Eismeier also participated in last year's program.

Career Center Director Kino Ruth was interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article highlighting summer internships and the increasing demand by companies offering unpaid internships that students receive credit for their work.

History major Jessie Clough ’07 (Ava, N.Y.) decided to apply for a Levitt Fellowship because she wanted a summer of research to find out what studying history was really like. But what for a topic? Then Clough went home for a weekend and found a box in the attic marked “Daniel’s Diaries.” What she discovered were the diaries of Daniel Bork and an account of the end of the village of Delta, N.Y., which was emptied in 1908 to make way for an extension to the barge canal. Clough walked into Assistant Professor of History Lisa Trivedi's office the following Monday and said, “I know what I want to write on.” The result was a proposal titled “The Village of Delta: Public Policy and Community History.”

Matthew Chuff ’08 and Robert Wysocki ’07 are working on an ongoing project in Professor of Biology Jinnie Garrett’s lab this summer. The project examines the AAT1 gene in yeast, which, when mutated, prevents the cells from growing on enriched media. Chuff and Wysocki are building on work done in previous summers in order to determine how the loss of AAT1 function affects cell growth.