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Assistant Professor of Biology Michael McCormick's doctoral dissertation, "Biotic and Abiotic Transformations of Alkyl Halides in Iron-Reducing Environments," was chosen unanimously as one of two winners of this year's CH2M HILL/AEESP and Parsons Engineering Science/AEESP Doctoral Thesis Award competition.

Hamilton students who have been using computational chemistry in their summer research presented their findings at the MERCURY conference. Christy House '06, Danielle Masse '07, Mary Beth Day '07, Matt Palascak '07 and Becky Shepard '06, who work with George Shields, Winslow Professor of Chemistry, presented their work.

Around the Hill asked random members of the Hamilton community if they could ask President Stewart one question upon her arrival, what it would be. Here are some of the questions and her answers:

Ezra Pound, a 1905 graduate of Hamilton College, was featured in a New York Times article "Ezra Pound, Musical Crackpot." According to the article reviewing "Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound," a comprehensive sampling of the poet's little-known musical output, "...one listens quite fascinated. Much of it is strangely compelling, if eccentric, stuff."

The second national conference devoted solely to undergraduate computational chemistry, MERCURY, was at Hamilton July 30 to Aug. 1. MERCURY is a consortium of seven liberal arts institutions with access to high performance computing resources.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Tim Elgren published a paper, "Mechanistic Implications for the Formation of the Diiron Cluster in Ribonucleotide Reductase Provided by Quantitative EPR Spectroscopy," in the Journal of the American Chemical Association (JACS, 125, 8748-8759) with co-authors from Carnegie Mellon University. This paper reports a novel physical probe of dinuclear metal cluster formation in metalloproteins. Ribonucleotide reductase remains the focus of intense investigation because it is the only biosynthetic pathway to the formation of deoxyribonucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. These metal clusters must fully form before the enzyme becomes active. This paper conveys new insight into how they form.

Philip Klinkner, James S. Sherman Associate Professor of Government, was interviewed for a NPR series exploring the Korean War's impact on race relations. Korea: The Armed Forces Integrate aired on NPR Weekend Edition and can be heard using RealPlayer.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry John LaGraff was awarded a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant for "Integrating Nanoscience into the Undergraduate Liberal Arts Curriculum" is from the NSF Division of Molecular and Cellular Bioscience for 2003- 2004.

Richard Bernstein '80 was interviewed for the "Taking on the Street" section of Fortune magazine. In the Q&A titled "Still Bearish After All These Years," Bernstein, who is Merrill Lynch's chief U.S. strategist, responds to questions about the stock market.

Grass Valley, Nevada, part of the Great Basin, was home to some of the earliest Americans. Under the supervision of Tom Jones, professor of archaeology, 10 Hamilton students are participating in an archaeological field school and dig to explore how early Americans lived. To follow their six-week adventure, read weekly reports posted on their Web site: Field School 2003.