The Great American Solar Eclipse, a total solar eclipse that will sweep across the U.S. in August 2017, is already grabbing the attention of scientists like Williams College Professor of Astronomy Jay Pasachoff.
Williams College Prof. Jessica Chapman awarded $240,000 grant to pursue anthropological training to continue her research on the economic and cultural influence of Kenya's running industry.
Williams College Prof. Jay Pasachoff has received a National Geographic Society grant for his expedition to Salem, Oregon to view a total solar eclipse in 2017.
The planet Mercury will cross the face of the Sun on Monday, May 9, and Williams College professor Jay Pasachoff will be observing it from the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. “At the 1999 transit of Mercury,” Pasachoff reports, “Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona and I used spacecraft observations to show in detail how the merger of Mercury’s edge and the Sun’s edge appears. The dark silhouette of Mercury interacts with the unsharp edge of the Sun to give optical effects that hundreds of years ago for a similar event with Venus were confused with the discovery of Venus’s atmosphere.”
Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, will be the commencement speaker on June 5 at Williams. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert will speak at baccalaureate on June 4.
Williams College's Center for Development Economics will host a global poverty conference featuring Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and other noted economists April 7-8.
A popular and well-used building on the Williams College campus will attempt to live for one year with only the electricity it can generate on its own and the water it can recycle on-site. This endeavor will earn it a Living Building Challenge certification, the highest environmental performance standard for a building.
Williams College professor Matt Carter has received a three-year $361,539 NIH grant to conduct research into how the brain controls food intake.
Williams College professor Ronadh Cox has received a grant from the NSF to continue her work studying coastal erosion by storm waves. Cox has been studying this issue since 2008 along the coast of Ireland.
Williams College responds to call for leadership on climate change with ambitious plan to reduce carbon emissions, invest in renewable energy projects and create investment options in "green" or low-carbon funds.
A joint Williams College-MIT-Lowell Observatory team observed Pluto during a rare celestial event two weeks before a NASA spacecraft got a closer look at the former planet.
Two Williams College professors have been awarded an NSF grant to study inter-species dependencies called "mutualisms." The Biology and Chemistry professors will study how different species interact with and affect one another.
The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Affairs has awarded a Williams College professor a grant to evaluate the effects of child labor in India.
Eugene J. Johnson remembers taking the legendary art history course he now teaches, as a Williams College undergraduate in the fall of 1956. He went into it with zero interest in the arts. "I was dragged into it," he says. "But then I got hooked." Today, as the Amos Lawrence Professor or Art, Johnson inspires the next generation of art lovers with the modern version of that course, Aspects of Western Art (ARTH101).
Williams College math professor Frank Morgan is keeping an eye out for Major League hitters who veer toward the dugout on their way to first base. While at first glance this route might not seem the best way to start a sprint toward home plate, Morgan says his calculations prove it’s the fastest way around the diamond.
As it plays out on cable television news shows and newspaper opinion pages, the question of immigration can seem like an enormous problem that appeared overnight from nowhere. Among the things Williams College Professor Scott Wong wants his students to understand is that there is much more to the conversation, and that it is has long been intricately woven into any discussion of what it means to be American.
The George Olmsted Jr., Class of 1924, Prize for Excellence in Secondary School Teaching was established in 1984 with an endowment from the estates of George Olmsted Jr. and his wife, Frances, who wanted to recognize secondary teaching excellence. The Olmsted Prizes received national attention in 2005 when Thomas L. Friedman, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, highlighted the program and the prize recipients in his column. "The best way to ensure that we have teachers who inspire their students is if we recognize and reward those who clearly have done so," he wrote.
A new program sponsored by the Office for Information Technology (OIT) at Williams College is advancing media scholarship on the Williams College campus. The initiative, Integrating Digital Literacies - or IDeaL - allows faculty to enhance current course assignments with media components to allow students to express themselves visually, and to engage with and publish their research in varied digital mediums.
The sign on Associate Dean Laura McKeon's office in Hopkins Hall is simple and direct: "Go Away!" It isn't meant to be rude, it is the best advice she as director of International Study can give to students about taking advantage of the college's wide array of study away options. It's a bit of advice that for many students will define an important part of their Williams College experience.
Williams College political scientist Neil Roberts, who specializes in African-American and Caribbean thought and theories of freedom, is available for background interviews on Haiti. “The physical terrain of Haiti simply cannot withstand this level of devastation, which compounds the deforestation and building infrastructural decay,” Robert’s wrote in a recent blog post (“Haiti and the Metaphysics of Disorder”).
On the front door of the Williams College dining services office -- a small grey clapboard house tucked in the middle of the school's campus in bucolic western Massachusetts -- staffers have placed a bumper sticker that reads "No Farms, No Food." It's a message the college takes to heart. Williams dining services prepares 885,690 meals annually, for its approximately 2000 students, in 4 dining halls, a faculty house, and a number of snack bars.
Sustainability is more than a buzzword within Williams College dining services; it's an imperative. One of the most important ways the college achieves sustainability is by reducing food waste and minimizing resource consumption -- a goal that is written into the department's systems, policies, infrastructure, and building design.
Keeping Williams College on course to meet its sustainability goals is central to the work of the college's year-old Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives. It takes not only thinking big, but also thinking small. The center is charged with finding ways to incorporate principles of sustainability into campus life and to help the college in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below 1990-91 levels by 2020.
On the front door of the Williams College dining services office -- a small grey clapboard house tucked in the middle of the school's campus in bucolic western Massachusetts -- staffers have placed a bumper sticker that reads "No Farms, No Food." It's a message the college takes to heart.
Sustainability is more than a buzzword within Williams College dining services; it's an imperative. One of the most important ways the college achieves sustainability is by reducing food waste and minimizing resource consumption -- a goal that is written into the department's systems, policies, infrastructure, and building design.
As the national debate rages over health care reform, Lara Shore-Sheppard, associate professor of economics at Williams College, says one thing is clear: "doing nothing is definitely worse than doing something. Shore-Sheppard notes that while the debate can seem complex, the need for reform comes down to two big issues. "First, a large chunk of the American population has unstable health coverage, or no coverage whatsoever. Second, health care costs are high and rising." President Obama, she says, is tackling coverage first. Shore-Sheppard knows a little something about health coverage; she has spent much of her career studying the effect of expanding children's access to Medicaid.
In January, Williams College Professor of Chemistry Anne Skinner, along with six Williams students, will visit the headwaters of the Blue Nile to conduct archeological research. The project is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.
Williams College announced today the appointment as its 17th president of Adam F. Falk, dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He will succeed on April 1 William Wagner, who has served as interim president since July 1, following the move, after nine years, of Morton Owen Schapiro to the presidency of Northwestern University.
The U.S. Green Building Council has awarded Williams College's two new academic buildings LEED® Gold status. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design is the USGBC's rating system for the design and construction of energy-efficient, and high-performing buildings.
Scientists at this observatory outside Hangzhou joined residents and tourists across China and India in observing the longest total solar eclipse in a century and probably the most-viewed ever. The moon's shadow traced a path across the world's two most populous countries before racing across the Pacific, providing a view of totality for five minutes and 36 seconds for scientists gathered here from around the world as part of the Williams College Eclipse Expedition.
The July eclipse will be the 49th solar eclipse that Jay Pasachoff has viewed. A champion of using eclipse observations to study the solar atmosphere, he describes the science of eclipses in the cover story of the international journal Nature (June 11 issue). Pasachoff, who is chair of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Solar Eclipses, was invited to write the article as part of Nature's coverage of the International Year of Astronomy.
Today the field of journalism is under siege. In a Time's essay (Feb. 5, 2009), former managing editor Walter Isaacson wrote "the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions." And, yet, Inside Higher Education recently reported that applications to Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism have risen by about 40 percent since last year. Where are we going to end up? On Saturday, April 25, at 8 p.m. in Griffin Hall, room 3, on the Williams College campus, a distinguished group of journalists will consider the future of news and the institution of journalism.
In partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) presents Prendergast in Italy, the first exhibition devoted entirely to the watercolors, monotypes, and oil paintings by American artist Maurice Prendergast. Featuring over sixty views of Venice, Rome, Siena, and Capri, Prendergast in Italy also includes the artist's personal sketchbooks, letters, photographs, and guidebooks from his two trips to Italy in 1898 and 1911. Prendergast presented a view of Italy that was informed by European trends but did not disguise his strong American accent"”an accent that would come to dominate international discourse in the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary exhibition demonstrates the advances of abstract color and form that put Prendergast on the cutting edge of American modernism.
"Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology," by Morgan McGuire of Williams College and Odest Chadwicke Jenkins of Brown University, was recently published by A K Peters, Ltd. The book is targeted at three different audiences: students, independent developers, and new professionals in the gaming industry. It offers different approaches for each audience group and incorporates a series of worksheets that facilitate the drafting of a game industry design document.
For Williams College biology professor Heather Williams, the songs birds sing are more than a pleasant part of a spring day. They are a window into how communication works in the natural world. A birdsong is more than just an encapsulated package of information, it is "a behavior frozen in time."
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) will join in a discussion of "Race and the New Congress" on Monday, Nov. 17, at 8 p.m. in Chapin Hall on the Williams College campus. The gathering will be the first of CBC members since Congress recessed for the election. The event will be moderated by 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl.
On Friday, August 1, 2008, the moon will pass in front of the sun, blocking the everyday solar surface. When that happens, it gets a million times darker outside, allowing the faint outer layers of the sun to be seen and studied. Scientists Jay Pasachoff and Bryce Babcock of Williams College are leading an expedition to Siberia so as to station themselves and their equipment in the path of totality, which is only hundreds of miles wide in spite of being thousands of miles long.
The September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq have raised a number of questions about U.S. intelligence. Why did the intelligence community fail to prevent 9/11? How do policymakers use intelligence to make decisions about war and peace? Should Americans be willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of national security? Richard Betts explores these questions and others in his critically acclaimed recent book, Enemies of Intelligence.
"Introduction to Topology" is geared toward students with a minimal background in formal mathematics. It is designed to serve as a textbook for a one- or two-semester introduction to topology at the undergraduate level, or at an introductory graduate level.
Williams College is bringing together some of the best minds in academia, business and science for a two-day symposium on "Global Warming and Developing Countries: Addressing and Coping with the Challenge," Thursday and Friday, April 10 and 11. The symposium will focus on the critical long-term issue facing millions in low- and middle-income countries around the world: how they will deal with global warming. In particular, the conference will address policies that governments in poor countries need to consider now, while there is still time to make realistic adjustments.
Daniel Aalberts, associate professor of physics at Williams College, was recently awarded grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America" by Robert F. Dalzell and Lee Baldwin Dalzell explores the social and cultural significance of Kykuit, the most famous of Rockefellers' houses in Historic Hudson Valley, New York.
When Williams College invited Thomas C. Jorling to return as a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies, the retired educator, government administrator and corporate executive knew he would find major changes in the classroom after 20 years away from college teaching.
"'Like You'd Understand, Anyway' serves as testament not only to Jim Shepard's talents but also to the power of the short story itself, forged from the world with a sharp eye and a careful ear, serving no agenda but literature's primary and oft-forgotten one: the delight of the reader," writes Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) in the Sunday New York Times Book Review (Sept. 23).
The WIT program at Williams College offers hands-on, in-depth multimedia experiences. The work is technologically intense and requires frequent communication between students and sponsors to assure that the projects meet sponsor specifications.
"There's something about being at a place like this that makes students want to do science." Williams College Director of the Science Center Professor Charles M. Lovett Jr.'s words are evidenced by increasing participation with the college's Summer Science Research Program.
The National Science Foundation has announced the award of $263,274 to Williams College biologist Claire Ting. It will support her work in exploring the structure, function and evolution of the photosynthetic apparatus in one of the most important marine primary producers of the world.
The National Science Foundation has announced continued support for the Center for Workshops in the Chemical Sciences (CWCS) with an Undergraduate Education, Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement program grant. Of the more than 50 proposals NSF received in this category, fewer than 8 percent were approved and funded.
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