All News

As a kid growing up in Tampa, Fla., Preston Perez ’22 was always close to the water. “My family does a lot of bonding activities around the ocean,” he said. At 10 years old, Perez got his scuba diving certification; a few years later, he began volunteering with the Dagger Dive program of Task Force Dagger, an organization dedicated to helping members of the Special Operations Forces community.

Assistant Professor of Physics Viva Horowitz was working as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard when she began to take a more serious interest in the dynamics of a cell’s cytoplasm. “In physics, we have equations that allow us to model things and predict how things will move,” Horowitz said. “And it turns out that the cytoplasm completely breaks those rules — there’s motors pushing things around.”

“I kid you not — we are doing something that’s never been done before,” said Yassine Dhouib ’24 about the research that he, Dara Levy ’23, and Professor of Computer Science Dave Perkins are conducting this summer. The trio are working on two different projects in the field of computer science, aiming to improve and streamline industry-standard algorithms.

Household names like Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, and Stephen Colbert are just a few notable pat members of the Chicago improv group The Second City. This summer, Ben Leit ’22 will be studying comedy in a program hosted by this very group, in conjunction with Columbia College Chicago.

A typical student research project might build on information found in various online or print resources. Hongyu Zhang ’24 is working with data from a slightly more extraterrestrial source: NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope.

Amidst the empty, repetitive days of COVID-19 quarantine, Will Rampe ’24 embraced the opportunity to look into a potential career path. “I got more into learning about contemporary political issues, but also about political theories and broader phenomena,” he said. “I decided I’d be interested in seeing what the profession is all about.”

Three Hamilton students — Anokhi Manchanda ’22, Cole Kuczek ’23, and Henry Schwob ’22 — are working on summer research projects concerning police and court reforms and a potential human rights commission in the Utica area.

For many Hamilton students, a trip to the Howard Diner delivers little more than a late-night meal. But for Yenesis Alvarez ’22, it provided an unexpected academic opportunity. “I remember [during] my freshman year,” she recalled, “this random guy at the diner came up to me and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to learn about our business program?’”

These days, the name “Pfizer” brings to mind images of syringes and vaccine cards. But the pharmaceutical giant is concerned with far more than COVID-19 — just ask Ben Jakubczak ’23, who will be working remotely for Pfizer this summer. Jakubczak’s position will be as a research assistant, analyzing data on spontaneous blindness in Wistar Han rats in order to aid future toxicology studies.

For Hannah Katz ’21, college graduation felt like a moment to reflect and “pay forward.” “I decided that after spending a lot of time on my own education and my own experiences … I should spend some time doing service and giving back to communities,” she said. And now, Katz is doing just that by serving as a summer enrichment coordinator for the DREAM Program in Winooski, Vt.