Olivia DrakeJesse Friedman '11, Anya Olsen '11 and Catherine Steidl '11 received a Baden-Württemberg–Connecticut Exchange Grant for one year’s study in Germany. The Baden-Württemberg Exchange Program offers students an opportunity to earn college credits in one of Germany's top nine universities. Students spend the academic year at the university they choose. The Baden-Württemberg Exchange originated from a legislative partnership formed between the State of Connecticut and the German state of Baden-Württemberg in 1989. The agreement invites all students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities in Connecticut to study at any institution of higher learning in Baden-Württemberg. With nine universities from which to choose…
Zully Adler ’11 hopes to document cassette culture in five countries while Davy Knittle ’11 aims to explore the relationship between public space and location-based identity in three major cities. As 2011-12 Thomas J. Watson Fellows, Adler and Knittle will have one year to travel outside the United States for an independent study. Each student receives a $25,000 stipend, which is funded by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. The Wesleyan students were among 148 finalists nominated this year to compete on the national level. Of those, only 40 were selected for a fellowship. Adler, a history major focusing on European…
Marshall Johnson’s research is out of this world. For the past two years, the senior astronomy major used the Van Vleck Observatory’s 24-inch Perkin Telescope to study the transits of “exoplanets,” or planets outside our solar system, that orbit another star. His study, titled “First Results from the Wesleyan Transiting Exoplanet Program,” explains a refined orbital period of a newly-discovered planet named WASP-33b (Wide Angle Search for Planets). Ultimately, Johnson may prove that he’s discovered another planet, WASP-33c. “Here in Connecticut, with clouds and haze, we don’t have the best observing conditions, but I was still able to obtain high-quality…
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The Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) project was featured in the Aug. 1 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article titled “In Emergencies, Aid Agencies Turn to a College-Created Software Program.” The article focuses on an emergency-management program called Collabbit. Collabbit is a continuing effort involving undergraduates and computer science faculty at Wesleyan and Trinity College. The software tool helps coordinate large numbers of people and supplies involved in responding to disasters like blackouts and flooding. This is by far the largest project of any kind that I've worked on," Samuel DeFabbia-Kane’11 says in the…
When Wesleyan student-athlete Adrian “A.J.” Chan ’11 isn’t studying for an economics exam or making a tackle on the football field, he’s busy training Olympic athletes, college and high school students, NFL Superbowl Champions and NBA and NCAA team members. He’s also working with underprivileged youth who use sports as a vehicle for life lessons. Chan, who co-manages the Oakland, Calif.-based gym, Ant’s Mind and Body, prepares athletes by training the body, mind and soul as one. His business, which celebrates its 1-year-anniversary this month, was recently featured in The San Francisco Chronicle. “The training system is a combination of…
Carl West ’11, Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, and Tomas Prosen of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, are the co-authors of an article titled “PT-Symmetric Wave Chaos,” published in Physical Review Letters 104 in 2010. "This work studied the universal properties of this crossover and demonstrated that a simple scaling function could embody the effects of such dramatically different changes as increasing the system size, varying the initial energy, or having varying degrees of imperfections / disorder in the system," West explains. "While these results were obtained from a toy model, they carry direct applications to optics where…
This summer, Jourdan Khalid Hussein ’11 will be given the skills and experiences necessary to create, analyze, implement, evaluate, and affect policy in a multicultural, multiethnic society. As a Public Policy & International Affairs Junior Summer Institute Fellow, Hussein will spend seven weeks at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. The program’s mission is to increase leadership opportunities for future global policy leaders in both the public and nonprofit sectors by preparing students for graduate study in related fields. "The Junior Summer Institute is a highly focused and rigorous academic program that will help you…
Lesley Xu ’11 was featured in a July 25 issue of The Eagle Tribune of North Andover, Mass. for her efforts helping the climate crisis. Xu and five of her friends from other universities have been biking across Massachusetts for eight weeks handing out literature and hosting symposiums urging people to take action for solving the climate crisis. They knock on doors and ask residents to sign a petition that calls for "100 percent clean electricity" in Massachusetts. "We want to mobilize the population and take action," Xu says in the article. The students said they and other activists want…