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They say that students who study abroad tend to become very attached to their host countries. Drew Thomases ’07 (Roslindale, Mass.) would probably agree. Thomases was in India last fall and now returns to a kind of India by studying the Diaspora community in Queens, N.Y. Thomases will be advised by Jay Williams, the Walcott Bartlett Professor of Religious Studies as he uses his Emerson Grant to study the changing nature of the religious tradition within the Indian Diaspora.

Hamilton College has received a $500,000 Department Development Award from Research Corporation (RC) to increase faculty and technical staffing in the chemistry and physics departments. Only five U.S. colleges have received these RC awards since the first grants were awarded in 1989. Proposals for the award are by invitation only.

Zunfeng “Jeff” Chen ’08 (Brooklyn, N.Y.) and Jonathan Stults ’07 (Woodstock, N.Y.) are at Hamilton for summer research into mathematics. They have abandoned the topic they originally chose (“difference equations, differential equations, and Simpson’s paradox”) and moved to the study of n by n (square) matrices. “We’re counting all n by n matrices in Z mod p with all or no eigenvalues in Z mod p.”

David Hamilton ’09 (Middleton, Mass.) is spending his summer in the lab working with chemicals. The rising sophomore has returned for the second year of his STEP/Dreyfus grant and is working under Ian Rosenstein, associate professor of chemistry. Hamilton’s project is to synthesize free radical precursors to study the transition states of the cyclopropylcarbinyl radical ring opening reaction.

Danna Klein ’07 (Fort Lee, N.J.) is hard at work in the New York soup kitchens this summer. The public policy major has a Levitt Fellowship to investigate the efficiencies and inefficiencies of food-related services in the non-profit sector. Advised by Rick Werner, the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy, Klein will be studying a range of food services which operate in the East Harlem area of New York City. Her goal, she explains, is “to evaluate and to make recommendations based on inefficiencies in the public and private sectors in addressing social justice issues.”

While the large MERCURY conference was going on next door, another, smaller group of students also met at Hamilton for a science conference. This was the Colgate-Hamilton Organic Group conference, the creation of four professors at the two institutions for their organic chemistry students.  

Associate Professor of Economics Ann Owen was quoted in an article in <i>The Christian Science Monitor</i> on the state of the U.S. economy and the nation’s job market. Commenting on the job market and the complex nature of the economy, Owen said, “We see some strength and some signs of trouble down the road… The dilemma is that the numbers only tell the past, and you must make policy on what you think will happen." Commenting on new Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Owen continued, "On the line is the credibility of the Fed under the new chair, if they pause and it's the wrong call, people will say Bernanke is not committed to a low inflation rate. But if they raise rates and it's the wrong call, people will say he's overzealous."

Erica Fultz ’08 (Carlisle, Pa.) is a foreign languages major. But in her case that does not only mean that she can say, “two beers, please,” or “where’s the bathroom?” in three languages; for Fultz, her major gives her a chance to investigate the underpinnings of those languages. A former Freeman recipient, Fultz returns to campus this summer on an Emerson grant to work on a project entitled “A Generative Linguistical Approach to Japanese Verbal Nouns.”

Visiting Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner and Winslow Professor of Chemistry George Shields and their students have published a paper in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry.

Those in the Science Center last week (July 26-28) will have noticed the elegant tables set out in the atrium and a number of students in dress clothes or the distinctive bright blue “Shieldslab” shirts. Wednesday through Friday, Hamilton played host to the fifth annual MERCURY (Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry) Computational Chemistry conference.