Research
The spark: Teaching a cognitive psychology class in graduate school completely changed how Sharda Umanath viewed research. Staying in the lab to study memory was tempting, she said. But exploring both through the liberal arts proved to be the combination she was looking for. “Being at CMC puts a different emphasis on what I do. For my students here, I might be giving them the one research experience they’re ever going to have.
More than 250 works by CMC faculty will be on display at the third annual Faculty Publications and Grants celebration on February 15. Numerous professors will be on hand to discuss their research, published in 2018, at McKenna Auditorium.
Branwen Williams traveled from Claremont to the Arctic Circle in 2015 with a diver to search the frigid waters for coralline algae. Her goal: to examine the age and growth pattern of the algae to measure climate change.
Williams, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at the W.M. Keck Science Department, succeeded in collecting samples from the area—the first researcher to do so—and returned to campus to analyze them.
“A nuclear reactor is like a knife — it is a necessary utensil for cutting bread, but it can also be used to cut a throat.”
Shawn “Mickey” McFall ’18 invokes those chilling words, written by an exiled Iraqi nuclear scientist, in his own research paper on the potential threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
Mining operations are growing in sub-Saharan Africa, bringing both prosperity and challenges to the region. A Claremont McKenna College student found himself presenting on the subject alongside some of the world’s leading experts on the mining industry at a conference in London.
Claremont McKenna College will showcase faculty scholarship from the past calendar year at the second-annual Faculty Publications and Grants celebration on Feb. 16. CMC professors authored or co-authored more than 200 works, and most will be displayed inside McKenna Auditorium. Many faculty members will also be on site to discuss their research.
Prof. Zhaohua Irene Tang has been awarded a $412,415 National Institutes of Health grant to study cancer and other disease prevention and expand undergraduate research opportunities at CMC and the W.M. Keck Science Department.
The NIH grant comes through the Academic Research Enhancement Award program, which is offered to institutions that do not traditionally receive NIH funds. The goal is to increase hands-on research opportunities and enhance the research culture on campus.
The CMC-Lowe Institute of Political Economy will release and livestream its quarterly report, the Los Angeles Consumer Index, in Roberts 102 on Thursday, August 3, at 11 a.m. The second quarter 2017 index release initiates a new cooperation between the Lowe Institute and Chapman University for future consumer sentiment indexes.
To best understand the relationship between human activity and the environment in Asia, multiplicity is key. Examining the complexity of infrastructure issues through an environmental lens would yield one type of answer, while looking through the scope of history would yield another. Consider how music or media studies factor into the equation — what might those disciplines reveal about this tête-à-tête? EnviroLab Asia, a Claremont Colleges project, meets this query with a unique cross-disciplinary approach.
The term Latino Islamidad may not yet be mainstream, but a new report explores why a growing number of U.S. Latinos convert to Islam in hopes of understanding what it means to be a Latino Muslim today. The report is published in last month’s Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion.