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Michael Hosek ’19 presented a poster at the 17th Annual American Meteorological Society (AMS) Student Conference in Austin, Texas, on Jan. 7. the poster was was based on his internship with the National Weather Service.

Drew Castronovo ’19 hopes to travel one day to many of the world’s major volcanoes such as Fuji, Kilimanjaro, Pinatubo, Colima and Kiluaea. This summer he is tackling one that is just a little closer to the ground.

With the migration of hundreds of college students off the Hamilton campus, way has been made for a younger, more energetic, crowd. On Wednesday, June 7, and Thursday, June 8, third-graders from Hughes Elementary School, and Clinton Elementary School, respectively, visited the Taylor Science Center. As part of ongoing outreach with local public schools, faculty from the psychology, chemistry, physics, biology and geosciences departments hosted approximately 80 students per day, packing a variety of scientific disciplines into four interactive, 30-minute long seminars.

Eleven members of the Class of 2017 were recently elected into the Hamilton College Chapter of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society.

While Hamilton students are on spring break, science faculty opened their labs to welcome third graders from Myles Elementary School in New Hartford for some hands-on learning.

Although STEM is focused on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Hamilton students who had internships in those fields emphasized that it was their liberal arts education that made them stand apart.

Calling herself “the biggest fan of Dan Chambliss,” whose research she cites in her best-selling book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth explained to a large Chapel audience that success depends on grit - the propensity to pursue goals with sustained passion.

Hamilton welcomed computer scientist and author David Bailey on Nov. 3 for a lecture regarding the failures of the scientific community toward communicating the importance and wonder of scientific research to the general public. Bailey is a University of California Davis research associate and former computer scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His talk was funded through the James S. Plant Distinguished Scientist Lecture Fund and was sponsored by the Mathematics Department.

There’s a great big world of off-campus studies, and it’s not just for art history or French majors. To help prove the point, biology major Angel Pichardo ’17 gave a talk at a recent Hamilton colloquium about his semester in DIS Copenhagen. His program focused on biomedicine and drug development. The experience, says Pichardo, was the best four months of his life.

Science students returned this fall to find a significant addition to the analytical capabilities of the Chemistry Department: a PerkinElmer AAnalyst 600 Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectrometer. The instrument, donated by ICON, plc, enables users to detect and quantify trace elements in water, soil and sediments, and other matrices.