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Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, will deliver the Commencement address at Hamilton College on Sunday, May 20, at 10:30 a.m. in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House. The 455 members of the class of 2007 will receive bachelor's degrees.

Throughout the year, Hamilton plays host to a broad spectrum of approximately 200 speakers, from a former U.S. vice president to an organic farmer, on myriad topics, from film direction to congressional budgets. As the academic year comes to a close, a review of a list of some of these visitors highlights the diversity of disciplines, views and interests represented on campus as well as the opportunities afforded our students and our community.

Assistant Professor of Biology Mike McCormick was awarded a $100,000 grant by the Department of Energy to study the use of iron-reducing bacteria to help remediate groundwater contaminated with uranium. The iron-reducing bacteria that are the subject of the study use iron oxides to support cell respiration. In essence, they "breath rust." In carrying out normal life processes these bacteria profoundly affect the geochemistry of the environments where they live often producing a variety of biogenic mineral byproducts.

John Rice '78, one of four GE vice chairmen and president and CEO of Atlanta-based GE Infrastructure, is featured in the cover article of Georgia Trend magazine (May, 2007). Rice was named 2007's Most Respected Business Leader by the magazine. Rice oversees GE’s Energy, Aviation, Rail, Oil & Gas, Water, Energy Financial Services, and Aviation Financial Services operations, businesses that generate more than $54 billion in annual revenue and employ 90,000 people worldwide.

Associate Professor of Africana Studies Tiffany Ruby Patterson presented a paper titled "Caribbean Activism Stateside: 1968 and Beyond" at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association of Caribbean Historians in Kingston, Jamaica, May 7 -12. Her paper examined the life of Barbadian immigrant Richard B. Moore from 1920 to 1973. Moore was a major political figure in New York City during these years and from 1942-1968, he ran the Frederick Douglass Bookstore in Harlem. Radically opposed to racism and committed to Caribbean independence, Moore was an important spokesperson for the rights of all African people. He died in Barbados in 1978.

A Hamilton College Computer Programming Team has been formed to compete in collegiate programming competitions. A select group of students, under the guidance of Associate Professors of Computer Science Alistair Campbell and Mark Bailey, have been training since January for competitions. At such competitions, student teams from various colleges and universities are each given a set of problems to solve by writing computer programs. In a race against the clock, each team is ranked according to the number of problems solved in the shortest time.

Natalie Tarallo, a candidate for graduation on May 20 from Hamilton College, has been awarded a Fulbright grant to Mauritius. She will study ethnicity in youth political identity formation in Mauritius. Through observation, interviews and participation, she aims to discern and analyze the place of and role of ethnicity in Mauritian youth political identities as a model for other young multi-ethnic democracies. Tarallo will conduct research at the University of Mauritius, in secondary schools, community organizations, youth centers and the youth arms of political parties.

Brian J. Glenn, visiting assistant professor of government, served as the Public Policy program chair for this year's New England Political Science Association conference, held recently in Newton, Mass.  Glenn also presented a paper, "Embracing Risk II: The Rise and Decline of the Twentieth Century Social Policy Net."

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas presented a paper on “1968 and the Social & Political Foundations of the Working Peoples Alliance” at the 39th annual conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH) held in Kingston, Jamaica, May 7-11. The paper, an examination of a political party, the Working Peoples Alliance (WPA) of Guyana, assessed the emergence of new political forces in Guyana (along with regional and global influence) between 1968-1974, and established how the convergence of those forces or the ‘new politics’ culminated in the birth of the multi-racial WPA considerably changing the political equation in the South American republic.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, will deliver the Commencement address at Hamilton College on Sunday, May 20, at 10:30 a.m. in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House. The 458 members of the class of 2007 will receive bachelor's degrees.