Category: Articles

Amherst College Science Center

Traversing Biology at Amherst with Kindness: An Interview with Professor Clotfelter

Ethan Clotfelter has been a professor of biology at Amherst College for eighteen years. Some of his courses Form and Function, Animal Behavior, Adaptation, and the Organism, and Tropical Biology. What is your degree in and what was your educational path to achieving it? I graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill…

We Are the Cosmic Weirdos: Exploring the Role and Function of Dark Matter in the Universe

Profile picture of Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

On March 29, Presidential Scholar Chanda Prescod-Weinstein gave a talk in the Science Center called “Cosmic Probes of the Dark Sector.” Prescod-Weinstein is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She began her talk by telling the audience that “there are no stupid questions,…

Public Health as a Passion, as a Priority

Decorative liner

Christina Nieves. Photo courtesy of Loeb Center, Amherst College On Thursday, March 10, Christina Nieves ‘10 gave a talk in Pruyne Lecture Hall called “Health Equity in Practice, in a Pandemic: A Career in Public Health.” Nieves was a biology major at Amherst, and she currently works at the New York City Department of Health…

Dr. Victoria Fang ‘11 on Starting Your Own JRNLclub

Dr. Victoria Fang '11 and JRNLclub co-founder

Like most fortuitous encounters in my Amherst College career, I met Dr. Victoria Fang ‘11 through Professor Sheila Jaswal. I noticed the LinkedIn message while switching between tabs, taking breaks from the Google slides page on which I prepared slides for my first journal club. Not only was this the first journal club I was…

Overheard at the Science Center

two scientists

Inspired by the @overheard.amherst Instagram account and compiled over the course of the fall semester “I don’t have any final exams” – a humanities major about to leave campus before reading period “There isn’t a bathroom close enough to my classroom that I can go cry in during my tests, and it’s really affected my…

Climate Action Plan: Overview

Carbon neutrality by 2030. It is a pledge made by Amherst College to tackle climate change. One of its efforts includes the Climate Action Plan (CAP). For context, Amherst College has been and is reliant on fossil fuels. It went from individual coal boilers to centralized coal-fired steam plant to natural gas to a cogeneration…

Cooking up multicellularity in a tube

There is a palpable difference between the macroscopic animals we interact with daily and the microscopic unicellular organisms we can only appreciate under a microscope. The transition from unicellularity to multicellularity is perhaps one of the most significant evolutionary transitions that we know of today, even among other large-scale evolutionary transitions, such as tetrapods moving…

Ripple Effects: How Early Relationships Influence Health

On Wednesday, November 10, the Psychology Department’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee invited their first outside speaker to campus. Dr. Evelyn Mercado is a professor at UMass Amherst in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her talk “Exploring Relationship Behaviors, Emotions, & Biological Processes that Impact Health Across the Lifespan” drew a large crowd…

The Beauty Behind Mathematics and Communities: An Interview with Professor Moore

Katherine Moore is a visiting assistant professor of mathematics who came to Amherst this year. She received a Ph.D. in mathematics at Dartmouth College and was a postdoc at Wake Forest University. This fall, she is teaching courses in Calculus and Linear Algebra. What did you do before you started teaching here at Amherst, and…

AI and the Future of Your Mind by Dr. Susan Schneider

Dr. Susan Schneider published “Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind” in 2019. On October 19, 2021, she gave an eponymous talk at Amherst College, discussing AI-based brain enhancement at a rate higher than biological evolution and analyzing the merging of human mind and AI from a philosophical perspective. Image above: Hybrid event,…