By Arum Han Professor Kendra Marcus joined the Amherst College faculty as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry this semester. She is currently teaching biochemistry (CHEM 331) and specializes in researching proteins through the lens of evolutionary and structural biology. The Amherst STEM Network had the opportunity to interview Professor Marcus about her work. What inspired…
By Andrea Yan and Henry Sun Cover image credit: https://lsa.umich.edu/chem/people/faculty/gshultz.html In a packed Kirkpatrick Lecture Hall on October 18th, students and faculty in the Chemistry Department gathered for the week’s Cheminar series, which addressed an unconventional topic. Ginger Shultz, the week’s speaker, is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Associate Chair for Education Development and…
Following the advent of ChatGPT, natural language processing (NLP) has gained immense public attention and is very in demand. In fact, OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has propelled its valuation to $157 billion on October 2, 2024. As a new addition to the faculty at Amherst College, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Shira Wein…
On September 25, 2024, Gabriel Sosa Castillo delivered a talk about his research on reconstructible monomial orderings at the Amherst College Math Colloquium. Sosa Castillo previously worked at the College as an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department and now works at Colgate University. Sosa Castillo specializes in computational and combinatorial commutative algebra, which refers…
Photo and article by Maya Maaloul What makes changes in data significant? How do we, as humans with subjective opinions, decide this? What methods can detect these changes the best, and what if we can’t find the best tool? During an Amherst College Statistics and Data Science (SDS) Colloquium on September 24, Ben Baumer, a…
By Fernanda On January 19, twelve Amherst College students (including myself!) hopped in a car to Boston for the American Physical Society Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (APS CUWiP). CUWiPs are three-day regional conferences for undergraduate physics majors who identify as women or a gender minority, with the goal of helping them continue in physics…
By Ryogo Katahira Klara Matuszewska ’26 won a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award for 2024. The award is to “recognize exemplary research by undergraduate and graduate students” and is selected by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Matuszekska is a physics and astronomy double major from Warsaw, Poland and works in Professor Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi’s research…
On Friday, April 5, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Moungi Bawendi lectured at Amherst College. The lecture was held in Lipton lecture hall and was titled “Quantum magic and quantum dots: a synthesis unlocks a nano-world of opportunities.” Bawendi opened his talk by explaining how electrons have different properties at the quantum level. “So…
Photo by Maria Stenzel By Olivia Fann As prospective math majors may have noticed, a certain department was notably absent from 2024 SURF opportunities. This year’s lineup of nine disciplines and 36 total labs participating in Amherst’s Summer Science Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) did not include any members of the math faculty, raising some questions…
By Bibi Hanselman a2 + b2 = c2. Whether it’s a distant high school memory or it has found its way into your physics homework somehow, there’s no denying that the Pythagorean theorem — timeless and profound, seared into all our memories — is practically a cultural touchstone in addition to a mathematical one. On…