by Bill Sweet
January 12, 2016
One Amherst College student and two recent alumni will spend a year studying in Beijing as part of a new, highly selective fellowship program.
January 29, 2016
As Black History Month unfolds across February, Amherst College will host a musical performance by the Campbell Brothers Sacred Steel Guitars, presentations by renowned political consultant Donna Brazile and best-selling author Chris Abani, and various other events.
Jan. 25, 2016
By William Sweet
While he thinks “moonshot” may have not been the best word for Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s new initiative to beat cancer, Harold E. Varmus ’61, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former director of the National Cancer Institute, told Amherst students that with the right strategy, more successes against cancer may be coming.
“Cancer is many different diseases,” he said in the keynote address for the College’s annual Gerald R. Fink ’62 Bioscience Symposium.
Take a look inside the Student Machine Shop on the first floor of Merrill Science Center. In Jim Kubasek’s “Intro to Machine Shop” course, offered over Interterm, Amherst physics majors learned how to use lathes, milling machines, drill presses, grinders and precision measuring instruments to make things out of metal—a skill set that will come in handy if they ever need to craft their own customized pieces of laboratory equipment.
January 18, 2016
By Rachel Rogol
This figure illustrates part of the peculiar structure of the quantum knot. There are actually an infinite number of rings, each linked with all of the others exactly once. Image credit: Allen Li '15
AMHERST, Mass.—Physicists have long predicted the possibility of tying knots in quantum fields. But no one has been able to make or observe a three-dimensional quantum knot, until now.
In a breakthrough discovery explored in a paper published in Nature Physics, one of the most prestigious journals in physics, a scientific team led by Amherst Physics Professor David S. Hall ’91 and Aalto University (Finland) Professor Mikko Möttönen have found a way to create knotted solitary waves in a quantum-mechanical field.
Russian Center Exhibit Showcases Urban Scenes and Landscapes
January 11, 2016
By Rachel Rogol
The exhibition on view at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, ПОД ОТКРЫТЫМ НЕБОМ — Journeys in Space and Memory: Urban Scenes and Landscapes by Russian Artists, offers a journey to places in Russia, Western Europe and the United States that were cherished by the artists who depicted them while living and working there, or while longing for them in emigration. (See photos of the exhibition space in the slideshow below.)
Organized by Bettina Jungen, curator of Russian art at the Mead Art Museum, the exhibition opened in September 2015 and remains on view in the Russian Center Art Gallery throughout the spring semester. In an interview on the museum's blog, Mead Musings, Jungen offers insights into the various landscapes on view, from a sunny boulevard in Paris to a rural, sunbathed Moldavian farm.
Read an interview with exhibition curator Bettina Jungen.
January 7, 2016
In a move that gives libraries direct responsibility for helping to solve some of publishing’s problems, and that puts liberal arts colleges at the table of scholarly publishing, the Amherst College Press will partner with Michigan Publishing and a consortium of 80 college libraries to launch a new academic press.
Amherst students and Hampshire County inmates share an educational experience unlike any other
By Rachel Rogol
January 6, 2016
Amherst students Sylvia Hickman ’16 and Teresa Frenzel ’17 with inside students Phillip and Tyler, chatting after their last class together at the Hampshire County Jail and House of Correction
Last semester, Sylvia Hickman ’16 enrolled in the Amherst course “Equality and Violence,” which met every week at the Hampshire County Jail and House of Corrections in Northampton, Mass.
Organized as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, the course brought 10 Amherst and Hampshire College undergraduates (“outside students”) and eight incarcerated men (“inside students”) together as peers. The course focused on gender, racial and class inequality, and how these disparities are linked to violence and sexual assault on college campuses, in prisons and in the wider world.
