Professor of Anthropology Deborah Gewertz, Assistant Professors of Physics David Hall and Will Loinaz, Professors of Chemistry Helen Leung and Mark Marshall, Assistant Professor of Geology Whitey Hagador; and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Scott Kaplan all received grants.
Gewertz and her colleague, Frederick Errington from Trinity College, received $99,961 for their research in the consumption and trade of lamb flaps in Papua New Guinea and Fiji and the consequent increase in health disease in those countries.
Gewertz, who specializes in the anthropology of food, developed the project while she was in Papua New Guinea studying the social history of sugar plantations. During her stay, she noticed people seemed to really like lamb flaps, a delicacy that comes from sheep bellies and consists of 50-60 percent fat.
Lamb flaps had become a substitute for pork, due in part to the substantial population of Seventh Day Adventists on the island who do not eat pork and who import the lamb flaps from Australia and New Zealand.
Intrigued by the popularity of this fatty product, Gewertz began to wonder about how the market for such a product developed and how it has affected all those involved in its production, sale and consumption.
Gewertz pointed out that producers, consumers, tradesmen and government officials are all involved in the process. "[Lamb flaps are] a totem of sorts, a materialized representation of social groups, because of its ability to unite people under its sway," she said.
Last summer, Gewertz and Errington conducted preliminary research to persuade the NSF that theirs was a project worth funding. Their efforts succeeded.
In addition to an NSF grant, Gewertz and Errington have also received funding from the Amherst Council of Learned Society and from the College's Faculty Research Fund. "People have been very excited to fund this project," said Gewertz.
Hall received a grant of $317, 500 from the NSF to support his research on vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates, the coldest substance in the universe.
Bose-Einstein condensates are gaseous clouds of atoms 50-billionths of a degree of absolute zero, a temperature at which all atoms lose their distinctive properties and behave in the same way. Hall will study collisions at the atomic level.
Bose-Einsteins are also super fluids, substances that flow easily without pressure differences due to low viscosity, allowing vortices to form in the condensate. Hall's study looks at the nature of these vortices and studies how they interact between changing atoms in the condensate.
The College is an ideal climate for research because it allows undergraduates to participate. Some students worked with Bose-Einstein condensates during the Summer Science program, and others had the opportunity to work with them for their theses.
Hall was extremely excited upon receiving his NSF award letter. "It meant a lot to me; I'll frame it and put it up in my office," said Hall. "This is probably the most fun I've ever had; it's as close to being a rock star as I'll ever be."
Leung and Marshall received a grant of $330,787 from the NSF to research atomic and molecular phenomena that take place at the start of chemical reactions. By freezing molecules before they react and looking at how they rotate in space, Marshall and Leung will be able to determine any changes in structure that take place.
The duo will be working with Amherst students, which they both agree is a very significant aspect of the research opportunity that comes with the NSF grant. "It's important for Amherst students to be exposed to research. Chemistry is not just theory. They've got to get their hands dirty," said Marshall.
Loinaz, Hagadorn and Kaplan received a joint grant of $298,839 to create a computer cluster to be used for research that requires extensive computational processing and vast data storage.
Loinaz said that he, Kaplan and Hagadorn had been talking about working on such a project for a while. After they all went on leave, they came back refreshed and determined. "Also, we found the perfect guinea pig" confessed Loinaz, referring to David Schaich '06, who is doing his physics thesis on this project. "He's technically very strong and very interested. It made all the difference."
The project is already underway. Kaplan is running a small version of this computer cluster, which the group hopes to make bigger and faster as time goes on. Eventually, they hope to make the computer cluster available broadly to the college, and perhaps teach a course on it, particularly for those departments that have large data sets to analyze.