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The emergency departments in United States hospitals are under increasing pressure due to overcrowding. Tamar Nobel ’08 (Mamaroneck, N.Y.), a Hamilton student particularly dedicated to emergency care, takes this problem as her research this summer. Funded by a Levitt Fellowship and working with Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Selcuk Eren, Nobel is studying the availability of insurance coverage and hospital emergency department visits for asthma patients.

Stephen Okin ’10 (New York, N.Y.) is fascinated with current foreign policy, a fascination which led him straight to the big problems. The U.S. relies upon a rhetoric of liberty and democracy, but there are times when the promotion of democracy abroad conflicts with the need to secure national interests. Okin, a rising sophomore, has an Emerson grant and is working with Assistant Professor of Government Ted Lehmann to research this contradiction as regards the “Venezuelan threat:” the current political situation in Venezuela and its conflicting implications for U.S. foreign policy.

The Hamilton College Climate Change and Environment Issues Youth Poll, conducted in November by Assistant Professor of Economics Julio Videras and his class, was cited in a Christian Science Monitor article (7/5/07). The article, "Could this be the global-warming generation?," concerns the "Live Earth" concerts held around the world on July 7.

Associate Professor of History Shoshana Keller has published an essay titled "Going to School in Uzbekistan," in a new anthology, Everyday Life in Central Asia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 248-265. The article discusses school life in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods and is based on library work and interviews done in Uzbekistan in 2003.

Karl Kirschner, co-director of the Center for Molecular Design, published a paper in the July issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. The paper is titled "Calculating Interaction Energies Using First Principle Theories: Consideration of Basis Set Superposition Error and Fragment Relaxation" and is coauthored by Phillip Bowen (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Jennifer Sorensen (Seattle University).

Dean of Faculty and Professor of English Joseph Urgo took four students to the 11th International Willa Cather Seminar in France, June 24-July 1, where he presented a lecture. The seminar, "Willa Cather: A Writer's Worlds," took place in Paris and the Abbey St. Michel de Frigolet in Provence. The trip was an optional, culminating event to a senior seminar on Willa Cather that Urgo offered last spring. The students who attended were Leah Babb-Rosenfeld '07, Christine Mays '07, Laura Hartz '07 and Ashley DeMaio-Zacharek '08. The conference attracted 150 attendees.

Blake Hulnick ’09 (Richfield, Conn.) is anything but an average, errand-boy intern. Working in the office of the King’s County District Attorney in Brooklyn, N.Y., Hulnick doesn’t fetch anybody coffee; instead, he gets to do exactly the same job as the lawyers and paralegals beside him. He is in the Early Case Assessment Bureau (ECAB) Department, the part of the office which screens, categorizes, and arraigns every arrest that takes place in Brooklyn.

What summer job is better for college students – one that pays well and allows them to save money and pay for expenses, or one that doesn't pay anything but gives them the career-related experience they need to help land a "real" job after college graduation? It's a dilemma that many students face during the summer and sometimes it's difficult to find a  job that provides both.

An article co-authored by Associate Professor of Government and Associate Dean of Students Philip A. Klinkner titled “Measuring the Difference between White Voting and Polling on Interracial Marriage” was published by the Cambridge University Press Online Journal on May 10. The article had previously been published in print in the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race in September 2006. Micah Altman, senior research scientist at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, was Klinkner’s co-author.

When most people thinking of harvesting material from apis mellifera, they think about honey. Apis mellifera is, after all, the scientific name of the honeybee. That's not the case for Sarah Bertino '09 (Natick, Mass.), working under the advisement of Associate Professor of Biology and Director of the Neuroscience Program Herman Lehman. When Bertino sets out to harvest from bees, she's after their brains. She has about 30 seconds to extract the brain from the bee on the dry ice beside her and isolate it in a small test tube before the brain liquefies. That's just the beginning of a bizarre and captivating trail leading to an intimate connection with the human brain that holds the promise of yielding answers to the mechanisms of Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).