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Hamilton College Opportunity Programs students got a taste of volunteer work when they participated in a statewide Opportunity Programs United Service Week in July.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Myriam Cotten and her research team spent two weeks in July at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Fla., to study membrane-active peptides. Her team comprised of Matt Baxter ’11, Olivia Lin ’12, Courtney Carroll ’11, Billy Wieczorek ’11, Jason McGavin ’12 and Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry U.S. Sudheendra, used several state-of-the-art Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) instruments to obtain atomic-level information on peptide-lipid samples.

Although she was standing only two feet away in the operating room, Caitlin Williams ’11 was unable to see to the bottom of the large hole carved in the patient's brain. Using a technique called frontal craniotomy, the surgeon was removing a three-inch section that contained a massive tumor. The procedure made an impression on Williams, who is interning this summer for the Neurological Institute of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. “It truly affirmed my love of medicine and my passion to be a doctor,” she said.

Eugene Domack, the J. W. Johnson Family Professor of Geosciences, attended the 16th International Symposium on Polar Sciences in June in Incheon, Korea, where he presented an invited talk titled “Larsen Ice Shelf System (LARISSA): A Multi-disciplinary Earth Systems Approach to Antarctic Environmental Change.”

Although the brain of a fruit fly or a honey bee might seem too small to be very active, chemicals do rage underneath the surface tissue. For example, octopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a major role in learning and memory processes of Drosophila melanogaster (common fruit fly) and Apis mellifera (honey bee).

Associate Professor of Chemistry Myriam Cotten published a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society. The paper titled “High Resolution Heteronuclear Correlation NMR Spectroscopy of an Antimicrobial Peptide in Aligned Lipid Bilayers: Peptide-Water Interactions at the Water-Bilayer Interface” is co-authored with two undergraduatesas well as Dr. Riqiang Fu, a research scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee.

Despite the challenging economic climate, the number of Hamilton alumni who gave unrestricted contributions to the college in the last year increased as compared with the previous year as did the size of their gifts. More than 52 percent of all alumni participated in the fund, making this the 28th consecutive year that at least 50 percent have contributed.

Pandemonium is at work even in the most tranquil places. For instance, a young girl playing in the sand on a beach may not realize it, but the sand pile she has created is a study in complexity. As she sprinkles more sand on the top of the pile, a set of mathematical equations govern how each grain behaves, but the way the pile functions as a whole is seemingly random. Gregory Schwedock ’10 is interested in how order emerges from such simplicity.

Professors Martine Guyot-Bender, Scott MacDonald and Patricia O’Neill; Instructional Technologists Janet Simons and Krista Siniscargo; and Joshua Hicks ‘09 were part of this year’s Robert Flaherty Seminar, held from June 20-26 at Colgate University.

Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard, Samantha Rabin ’11 never thought her home was that different from any other. But now that Rabin is older, she realizes that because she is surrounded by crowded hotels and sun-scorched bathers, her seemingly commonplace life is actually dominated by an unusual economy. She is working with Associate Professor of Sociology Jennifer Irons to assess how a person’s financial position shapes his or her relationship to the community.