Research
In June, CMC announced its Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America. As part of this ongoing effort, individual CMC faculty, departments, and institutes are addressing race and racism through various curricular and co-curricular actions. We asked faculty members to share their work in these areas, and what they will continue to do to promote sustained and substantive engagement with issues of racial inequality.
Are wrongful convictions more frequent among Black Americans? In their article, “What Can DNA Exonerations Tell Us About Racial Differences in Wrongful Conviction Rates?” CMC economics professors David Bjerk and Eric Helland focused on “one set of convicts for which we know innocence with certainty—those who were convicted for a crime but later exonerated via DNA evidence of innocence.”
In the race for president of the United States, Republican incumbent Donald Trump has expanded his support among key Latino voters in Florida and Texas, according to results from Claremont McKenna College’s Latino Religions and Politics National Survey 2020.
With less than six weeks to go before the general election, Democratic challenger Joe Biden has a healthy 2-to-1 advantage over Trump in every age demographic and is significantly leading Trump among Latina women.
From investigating the resiliency of young adults to turning back the clock on memory for older populations, four professors in CMC’s Psychological Sciences department are looking at how we mentally manage our world. And their outstanding work has been rewarded with five large, highly competitive, external grants—virtually unprecedented for professors at small liberal arts colleges, especially in a single year—to fund research and further teaching at CMC.
Every 10 years, CMC’s Rose Institute of State and Local Government hosts a conference that coincides with the U.S. Census, offering valued expertise to government professionals grappling with how to manage the redistricting process, as well as new laws and regulations.
In the modern era of redistricting, all district lines must be reviewed after the Census to meet strict requirements for population equality and voting rights protections.
Just a week after her lab wrapped up with CMC’s Summer Research Program, Jennifer Feitosa was feeling wistful about a routine that combined valuable work with genuine camaraderie amid an isolating pandemic.
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.