Calendar of Events

Attention seniors! The Grad Fair is a one-stop-shop for all your Commencement needs. Pick up your cap and gown, confirm the details of family Commencement housing, order commencement photos or a class ring, and visit with representatives from the Loeb Center, Information Technology, Alumni Association and more. It's all the information that need before graduating plus snacks and a chance to win gift cards to local restaurants.

An Amherst College ID is required to pick up regalia. Students unable to pick up their regalia at Grad Fair times should contact Conferences and Special Events/Austin Huot at ahuot@amherst.edu.

There is no charge for regalia. Students are required to wear regalia at Senior Assembly on May 8 and Commencement on May 26.

Alo Basu, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at College of the Holy Cross, will present "Neuronal Complexity and Hippocampus-Dependent Cognition."

There is strikingly little understanding, at present, of how cellular and circuit-level variation in the mammalian brain relates to variation in cognition. Following from case studies of brain damage and disease in humans, current understanding of brain-behavior relationships is largely based on results of physical, chemical, pharmacological and genetic "lesions" that result in changes to neuronal morphology, circuit physiology and cognition in experimental systems. We have developed a mouse model of D-serine deficiency which reveals the limitations of the current paradigm, including the pitfalls of hypothesis testing as regards variability in neuronal structure and cognitive function. Further, we have uncovered deleterious effects of standard laboratory housing conditions on cognition in mice that suggest that the range of behavior that is being routinely observed in translational neuroscience is limited. We propose that the analysis of variability in hippocampal neuronal morphology and behavior can be combined with noninvasive environmental enrichment to test assumptions about how complexity of hippocampal neurons relates to hippocampus-dependent cognition in mice.

How did the ancient Greeks imagine the underworld? Their depictions of the life after death reveal the variety of conflicting ideas in the Greek tradition, from the continuative existences after death that preserve cultural memories to the compensatory afterlives that rectify the incompleteness of justice in the mortal world to the grand cosmic visions that bring together life and death, mortal and immortal, chthonic and celestial, into a single system. All these imaginings of afterlife make use of familiar tropes, names and images from the Greek mythic tradition, and each of the authors of an afterlife vision thinks with and through an imagined underworld in different ways for different ends.