All News

Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Ashleigh Smythe was recently invited by students from Utica College’s Asa Gray Biological Society to give a lecture in their research seminar series. She presented a seminar titled “Neptune’s Nematodes: Searching for the Root of the Nematode Phylogeny in the Sea.” The talk described Smythe’s on-going research into the evolutionary relationships of free-living marine nematodes.

Herm Lehman, chair and associate professor of biology, has published a chapter titled “The Cellular and Molecular Biology of Octopaminergic Neurons” in Biogenic Amines: Pharmacological, Neurochemical and Molecular Aspects in the CNS, edited by Tahira Farooqui and Akhlaq A. Farooqui (Nova Science Publishers, 2010).

Professor of Biology Sue Ann Miller has published an invited commentary titled “Integrative anatomy courses serve undergraduate and preclinical anatomy curricula” in the March/April issue of the journal, Anatomical Sciences Education, a publication of the American Association of Anatomists. Her Letter to the Editor was published in “early view” on-line on February 22 and is now in print copy [Anat Sci Educ 3:105–106 (2010)].

With the approach of spring, seed catalogs have begun to appear in mailboxes. One of these, the Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) catalog, includes two rare seed varietals cultivated in Hamilton’s 1812 Garden. The garden was registered as a Listed Member of the SSE in 2009.

At the recent annual meeting of the American Microscopical Society (AMS), Professor of Biology and Associate Dean of Faculty Pat Reynolds was guest of honor at the Society’s luncheon and presented with a plaque to commemorate his service as editor-in-chief of the Society’s quarterly journal Invertebrate Biology. Reynolds served 12 years as an editor, the last six as editor-in-chief.

A book with a chapter coauthored by Hamilton faculty Ernest Williams, Patrick Reynolds and Onno Oerlemans has been published by the University of Iowa Press. The chapter, “Interdisciplinary Teaching about the Adirondacks,” appears in Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest, (edited by Pavel Cenkl, 2010).

Some Hamilton students got a real taste of the Adirondacks on Feb. 7, as 20 members of Professor Ernest Williams’ Cultural and Natural Histories of the Adirondack Park went on a snowshoe trek to Grass Pond in Old Forge, N.Y.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Ashleigh Smythe joined five other scientists for two weeks of field research in Belize in January. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History operates a marine research lab on Carrie Bow Cay, a one-acre island 10 miles offshore on Belize’s southern barrier reef.

A group of four Hamilton faculty members has been awarded a grant of $177,950 through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to fund a shared-use state of the art computing cluster. The project, titled "MRI-R2: Acquisition of a High Performance Computing cluster with a fast interconnect to enable shared-use, college-wide computational investigations at Hamilton College” is led by Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe as principal investigator with Assistant Professor of Biology Wei-Jen Chang, Assistant Professor of Physics Natalia Connolly, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale contributing as co-principal investigators.

Professor of Biology Jinnie Garrett and Associate Professor of Philosophy Katheryn Doran will present a talk titled "Building Better People?: Genetic Engineering and the Roots of Evil" on Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 7:30 p.m. at The Other Side in Utica. This is the third event in the 2009-2010 Imagining America collaboration between Hamilton College and The Other Side.