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Throughout the academic year, Lisi Krainer '06 (Villach, Austria) spends much of her free time responding to emergency medical calls on campus. As a Hamilton College Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) for the past two years, Krainer, an aspiring physician, takes the job to heart and says that comforting her patients is a priority high on her list. This is so important to her that she applied for and won an Emerson grant this year and has devoted a summer of research to discovering the degrees of empathy that EMTs exercise with their patients.

Levitt Fellow Heather Comforto ’06 (Port Townsend, Wash.) is studying three small western U.S. towns this summer, as she researches for a project titled “Creating Social Economies Within a Market Economy.” She selected Port Townsend, Wash., Mendocino, Calif., and Fort Bragg, Calif., on the basis of their social consciousness.

Qi Ge ’06 (Shanghai, China) is a three-time veteran of conducting summer research at Hamilton as a Levitt Fellow. This summer, Ge, an economics and math major, is conducting research for a project titled “Determinants of Firm Performance: Evidence from Panel Data for Bulgaria, Russia and the Baltic Republics.”

Haley Reimbold ’06 (Roosevelt, N.J.) spent much of her summer abroad, first in Sweden, as she wrapped up her spring semester there, and then in Germany for two months. Spending time in foreign countries was not merely for enjoyment and travel — Reimbold had a specific purpose, to research and observe the degree of equality within the education systems of these nations for an Emerson project she is creating, titled “Equal Opportunity for All: A Comparative Study of Education in Germany, Sweden and the United States.”

Frank Anechiarico, the Maynard-Knox Professor of Government and Law, has spent the summer in several European countries discussing the problems of controlling corruption in public administration and improving the performance of government.

Avery Rizio '09 of Walpole, Mass. spent five weeks working with Stone Professor of Psychology Douglas Weldon as part of the STEP/Dreyfus program for incoming first-year students. She worked alongside Hamilton students Christina Nemeth '06 and Erica Colligan '06 in a neuroscience research lab.

Stephen Wu, assistant professor of economics, published an article titled “Where Do Faculty Receive Their Ph.Ds?” in the July/August 2005 issue of Academe, the bi-monthly publication of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The paper studies the doctoral origins of faculty at top research universities and liberal arts colleges across six different disciplines, including chemistry, economics, English, history, mathematics and sociology. The results demonstrate that a large proportion of faculty generally receive their doctorates from a select group of top Ph.D.-granting institutions within their field. The study also finds that these concentration ratios vary significantly across the disciplines as well as between research universities and liberal arts colleges.

After Elizabeth Debraggio ’07 (Clinton, N.Y.) worked at the Utica Refugee Center as part of her sophomore seminar last year, she coupled this experience with her economics background to formulate an idea for a summer research project. This summer, Debraggio, who has worked on campus for the past several summers, is a Levitt Fellow, conducting research for a project titled “September 11 and the Effect on Immigrant Composition and Wages.”

Three Hamilton students and a Hamilton alumnus are working with Winslow Professor of Chemistry George Shields and Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner to continue long-term research on an enediyne anti-cancer project. Frank Pickard '05 (Escondido, Calif.) Tumie Gopolang '08 (Orapa, Botswana) Evan Savage '08 (Delmar, N.Y.) Jovan Livada '08 (Belgrade, Yugoslavia) are researching esperamicin A1 in the enediyne family in their project titled "Exploring Bergman Cyclization Energy Barriers in Esperamicin A1."

David Turchin ’06 (Newburyport, Mass.) is all about cotton this summer. As a Levitt Fellow, Turchin is researching first-world subsidies, one of which is cotton, a leading subsidized crop in the U.S., and is measuring the effects on West African economies. In addition, he is assessing the prospects for U.S. policy reforms and what this could mean for economic development and poverty reduction in the region in a project titled “The Cotton Harvest: Harvesting Subsidies, Harvesting Poverty.”