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For the 29th year in a row, the ecology class (Bio. 237) went up Whiteface Mountain to look at how and why the composition and structure of the forest changes with elevation. The 23 students on the Oct. 7 trip were led by Associate Professor of Biology Bill Pfitsch and Ernest Williams, the William R. Kenan Professor of Biology.

Five Hamilton students who spent the summer working in science-related internships had the opportunity to share information on their experiences in the first event in a new Career Center series on Sept. 24.

Two of Ken Bart's microscopy images appear in an article “Everyday Objects Up Close” in The Huffington Post (9/17/12). Bart is director of Hamilton’s Microscopy and Imaging Facility. The slide show features electron microscope images provided by scientific instruments company FEI.  Bart’s images show the surface of a tomato leaf and a caterpillar.

Professor of Biology Jinnie Garrett presented a workshop titled "Critical Consumption of Scientific Developments at the Local Level: How does community decide whether a particular scientific product is beneficial?” at the Grassroots Women's Political Leadership Forum held Sept. 9-19 at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

In August, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Ashleigh Smythe joined five other scientists and scuba divers for two weeks of field research on the island of Tobago, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, in the southern Caribbean Ocean.

Assistant Professor of Biology Wei-Jen Chang and his thesis students, Tani Leigh ’12 and Matthew Therkelsen ’12, presented during the Protist2012 conference held July 29-Aug. 3 at the University of Oslo in Norway.

When Nick Richards ’12 entered Hamilton, he was sure he was going to medical school. “I was gung-ho pre-med,” the biology major remembers. Four years later, however, Richards has begun working at Huron Consulting Group in New York City with an eye toward a career in investment banking. Richards’ transformation came about thanks to a variety of extracurricular activities, and he now encourages incoming first-year students to “think about everything.”

Hamilton’s student researchers are making great strides in the expansive Ich Genome Project, a multi-institutional effort to develop preventative and combative treatments for Ichthyophthirius multifiliis (Ich), also known as white spot disease in fish. Ravi Jariwala ’13 and Rachel Green ’14 are working under the direction of Associate Professor of Biology Wei-Jen Chang and recent graduate Matthew Therkelsen ’12 to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) genetic markers.

Professor of Biology Ernest Williams participated in the international conference on Monarch Biology and Conservation June 21-23 in Minneapolis,where he gave a talk on “Microclimatic benefits of the high elevation oyamel fir forest.”

Agne Jakubauskaite ’13 has come full circle in the course of her undergraduate research of the newly discovered gene TBhR. Jakubauskaite, a biology concentrator, spent the summer of 2011 learning the ins and outs of protein expression and synthesizing and has now passed on those skills to Jessica Li ’14, a biology concentrator and Olusegun Ogunwomoju ’15.