All News

The Hamilton College Competitive Swim Camp welcomed Olympic silver medalist Kristy Kowal as their guest clinician on July 12. Kowal was with the camp for one day; she gave a lecture in the morning, coached the campers in two swimming sessions, and joined them for an afternoon cook-out.

Louisa Brown ‘09 (South Wales, N.Y.) is spending her second summer working with Professor of Chemistry Karen Brewer. Brown is a STEP/Dreyfus recipient returning for her second year of lab work. She is involved in one of Brewer’s lab projects with rare earth metals, in which she chelates rare earth metals with different diketones to compare the resulting fluorescence.

Timothy Eddy ’07 (Pittsfield, Mass.) is on the Hill for summer research into a country far, far away. His Levitt research will focus on the increasingly complicated and contradictory nature of U.S.-Uzbek relations, as well as the implications of this relationship on U.S. foreign policy and security overseas. Advised by Sharon Rivera, assistant professor of government, Eddy is working on a project titled “The Andijon Massacre: A Major Setback in U.S.-Uzbek Relations?”

James McConnell ’07 (East Setauket, NY) is spending his summer in the lab of George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry, although he is also working on several projects with Associate Professor of Chemistry Timothy Elgren, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Camille Jones respectively. Originally, McConnell had planned to work on heme-induced dehalogenation but has since branched out to other projects, all of which come under the umbrella headings of applied statistical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.

Chemistry major Marco Allodi ’08 (Oriskany, N.Y.) is busy this summer, multi-employed in the lab of George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry. Allodi is working on two very different projects. The first deals with atmospheric reaction kinetics and pre-reactive complexes while the other is an attempt to model ene-diyene anti-cancer drugs.

Niels Lesniewski ’07 (Stonington, Conn.) grew up hearing his grandparents tell stories about the hurricane which, in 1938, destroyed New England. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, Lesniewski thought of the stories he’d been told; “part of me was thinking, that could very well be my hometown too.”

History major Jessie Clough ’07 (Ava, N.Y.) decided to apply for a Levitt Fellowship because she wanted a summer of research to find out what studying history was really like. But what for a topic? Then Clough went home for a weekend and found a box in the attic marked “Daniel’s Diaries.” What she discovered were the diaries of Daniel Bork and an account of the end of the village of Delta, N.Y., which was emptied in 1908 to make way for an extension to the barge canal. Clough walked into Assistant Professor of History Lisa Trivedi's office the following Monday and said, “I know what I want to write on.” The result was a proposal titled “The Village of Delta: Public Policy and Community History.”

When Music/Philosophy major Christopher Boveroux ’08 (Appleton, WI) traveled to Estonia with his high-school choir, he most likely assumed that the trip was only a chorus concert, albeit an interesting one. It was in the massive amphitheatre where once nearly a third of the population of Estonia gathered for a three-day music festival that the idea for a summer proposal was born. Several years later, Boveroux applied for and was offered an Emerson Grant to research, with Heather Buchman, assistant professor of music, the key role of music in the Baltic Independence Movement.

Some people never stop. Michael Mortimer ’07 (Montague, N.J.) spent last summer based on campus researching the friendship between Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. This summer, he finds himself several hundred miles south and several hundred years later as, with Peter Cannavo, visiting assistant professor of government, he researches human-induced saltwater intrusions in the Upper Floridian aquifer.

Elena Filekova ’08 (Gabrovo, Bulgaria) is a double major in mathematics and economics and has taken numerous Hamilton economics courses in which she learned, understandably, a great deal about the U.S. economy. She is also well-read in EU economic development. She was surprised, however, to learn how little had been published about her own country of Bulgaria, set to enter the EU in 2007. What was the preparation for this entry doing to Bulgaria’s economy? What effects would this have on states already in the EU or future members? No one had dealt with these questions and Filekova, interested, applied for and was granted a Levitt Research Fellowship to study the macroeconomic effects of the Bulgarian integration into the European Union.