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It was a reunion of sorts at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, held in Memphis, August 6-12. Ernest Williams, the Leonard C. Ferguson Professor of Biology, Dan Gruner '93 and Jeff Evans '99 were all presenters at the meeting. Gruner and Evans were Williams' senior thesis students during their time at Hamilton and both graduated with honors in Biology.

Science research is popular as a summer activity for Hamilton students, but most of them do their work on the Hill in the new Science Center. Matthew Crowson ’09 (Kanata, Ontario) was one of the few who worked off-campus. Crowson, an undeclared biology or biochemistry major, spent his summer as a research assistant/intern at The John & Jennifer Ruddy Canadian Cardiovascular Genetics Centre at the Ottawa Heart Institute.

Almost a year ago, Joseph Jansen ’07 took a State and Local Politics class with Professor of Government Ted Eismeier. For the class, Jansen wrote a paper about the effect of the Supreme Court on Federalism as regards religion. “It interested me,” Jansen said, and as a result, he found himself applying for and receiving a Levitt Fellowship to research the progression of the understanding and interpretation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses from the colonial period to the modern era. He is advised by Eismeier.

Victoria Jenkins ’09 (Yonkers, N.Y.) was on campus this summer to study reverse micellar solutions in the lab of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones. Jenkins was also involved in a larger project which deals with clathrate, or gas, hydrates. The lab had as a final goal the synthesis of a hydrate from a reverse micellar solution although the project was then split up so the component parts could be studied. Jenkins was studying the basic reverse micellar solution of isooctane, sodium docusate salt, and water in order to understand the fundamentals of water behavior in the solution.

Rebecca “Ruth” Dibble ’07 (Raleigh, N.C.) spent her summer as an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The rising senior art history major had a position as a volunteer intern in the department of European Decorative Arts assisting Jeff Munger, a curator of the collection.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons attended the American Sociological Association annual meeting in Montreal, Quebec. She served as one of three critics at an Author-Meets-Critics roundtable on David Cunningham's book, Something's Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. She also presented a paper at a regular session called, "Constructing the Knowledge of Repression: An Empirical Analysis of Cultural Factors that Shape Covert State-level Repression."

A record number of 225 incoming first-year Hamilton students (about 45 percent of the incoming class) are participating this week in Adirondack Adventure, an outdoor orientation program for new students. The students arrived on August 15, a week before regular orientation, for eight days of games, hiking, canoeing and service projects.

Like many of his classmates, Luke Forster ’08 (Averill Park, N.Y.) opted to do research this summer. Forster, a world politics major and Chinese minor, spent his summer on the Hill, working with Assistant Professor of Government Sharon Rivera on a comparative study of democratization in Ukraine and Belarus.

For the 25th consecutive year, more than 50 percent of Hamilton alumni made contributions to the college. Of the 50.2 percent who made contributions, 55.5 percent increased the size of their gifts, a jump from 53 percent a year ago.

Maxwell Akuamoah-Boateng ’09 (Syracuse, N.Y.) is at Hamilton for his first summer of research, working in the lab of Professor of Chemistry Timothy Elgren. Akuamoah-Boateng is investigating a more efficient way of encapsulating an enzyme in silica sol gels. Sol gel is glass made from mixing a solution of silica (tetramethylorthosilicate) with water and acid. This solution mixture when allowed to dry forms the silica (glass) gels used in this experiment.