Baird was awarded two grants by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The first grant will help Baird fund a lab technician to assist him with his research on certain aspects of the brain. “The technician will support my work conducting brain recordings to identify neurons in the brain that process taste and digestion information,” he explained. “I want to evaluate how these neurons respond to novel neuropeptides recently found to potently influence food intake after injection into the body or the brain. The long-term goal is to identify potential therapeutic compounds that could contribute to the treatment of obesity and other eating-related disorders.”
Baird’s second grant will help fund the acquisition of new equipment, which will benefit the College’s entire neuroscience department. “The grant provides for equipment to facilitate my research: a new digital microscope, a cryostat to prepare brain tissue for microscope slides and a stereotaxic device to allow for precise brain injections,” he noted. “Importantly, the new equipment will be used in a shared facility so that all neuroscience seniors will be able to use them to conduct their thesis research. This grant allows us to replace outdated pieces of equipment that are well past their prime, ranging from 20 to 50 years old, and in doing so, it allows our neuroscience program to keep pace with the rapid technological developments in the neuroscience field.”
Benedetto was awarded a three-year grant of $151,059 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help him conduct research in arithmetic dynamics. “[Arithmetic dynamics] is a subfield of mathematics involving number theory and dynamical systems,” he said. “Number theory, loosely speaking, is the study of integers and prime numbers; dynamical systems, loosely speaking, is chaos theory.” Benedetto notes that some of the research will involve the use of advanced computer computations, something that he has worked on in the past. “As one part of the grant, in one of the upcoming summers, I hope to have a couple of Amherst students work for me, studying some of the problems in the field and hopefully generate some computational data to inform various conjectures in the field.”
The Dynamical Uniform Boundedness Conjecture is the central theme of Benedetto’s NSF funded research. “In 1950, mathematician Douglas Northcott proved that in situations with polynomials of rational coefficients to at least the second degree, there are always only finitely many rational preperiodic points,” he explained. “In 1994, mathematicians Patrick Morton and Joseph Silverman conjectured that in Northcott’s situation, the number of rational preperiodic points is never more than some upper bound that depends only on the degree of the polynomial. In the case of degree two polynomials, mathematician Bjorn Poonen conjectured more specifically that such polynomials never have more than eight rational preperiodic points. To date, no one has found a degree-two polynomial with rational coefficients and at least nine rational preperiodic points, so Poonen’s conjecture, as well as Morton’s and Silverman’s, looks like it is correct, but no one has managed to prove that yet. This puzzle is one of the key motivating factors in my research.”
Hall’s grant — $496,086 over three years — also came from the NSF, but from its Division of Physics. The grant will help him continue his research on ultra-cold gases and the Bose-Einstein condensates. He has been conducting research on these topics for the past 10 years that he has been at Amherst, as well as during his two-year post-doctoral stint at the University of Chicago. “With the ultra-cold gases, the basic idea is that we take an atomic sample and cool it to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero,” he explained. “When the temperature gets that low, the quantum mechanical properties that you ordinarily wouldn’t see in a sample of gas atoms start to become very evident. The so-called Bose-Einstein condensates are microscopic manifestations of quantum matter, and they’re interesting to study because you don’t usually get to see quantum mechanics operate on a large scale, and while large here might just be hundreds of microns, that’s large enough to see.”
Hall first became involved with researching ultra-cold gases and the Bose-Einstein condensates after earning his doctorate in physics in 1997. He was searching for an exciting topic to explore, and when the right opportunity came along he instantly grabbed it. “An opportunity came up to work with two of the three people who had seen this phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation just a couple years before,” he said. “I wasn’t going to turn that opportunity down. That was a no-brainer really.”
Fellow physicist Hunter was awarded a grant of $359,733 from the NSF’s Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics to conduct research in two interrelated areas of physics. The first involves the search for the electron electric dipole moment using a solid. “The interest in the electron electric dipole moment is that it violates the fundamental symmetry of nature,” he explained. “It’s called time-reversal symmetry, which says that the laws of physics should be symmetrical, and the distance of a permanent electric dipole moment within a fundamental particle violates time-reversal symmetry. It’s also a test of super-symmetry which is a theory in particle physics, which says that particles have super-symmetric partners, and it turns out that it’s very difficult for super symmetry not to yield electric dipole moments that are in the range which we’re exploring now.”
The other area of Hunter’s research deals with the preferred direction of the universe. “It’s a principle called Local Lorentz Invariance,” he noted. “We did one test done on this in the mid-’90s, and there has been renewed interest so we’re trying to do more work on it now. We have one of the world’s most sensitive nuclear magnetometers and one of the world’s most sensitive electron magnetometers, and we’ve put them together. We’ve bounded the entire apparatus to the rotation table, and so this helps us. Essentially, one magnetometer points out in the equatorial plane, and the second one points along the spin axis.”
Levin and Miller also received their five-year, $400,000 grant from the NSF, which they will use to continue their research on phylogenetic molecular systematics and the evolution of reproductive systems in flowering plants — in particular, Lycium, a close relative of the tomato, pepper and eggplant.
“What’s great is that this new funding will help us to sustain international collaborations in areas such as South Africa and Argentina that we developed as part of previous NSF grants,” Levin said. “These collaborations have been instrumental to our understanding of worldwide relationships among species of Lycium, and we look forward to continuing these relationships, as well as developing new ones in other parts of the world.”
The pair’s grant-funded research will also foster curricular development and a summer training program for local high school teachers in molecular biology, genomics and systematics.
In the humanities, Sarat received a $167,979 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which will allow him to serve as the director of a summer seminar for high school teachers on campus next year. “The NEH sponsors a variety of these seminars,” he explained. “Fifteen high school teachers from around the country will come here this summer for five weeks. For them, it’s a professional development opportunity. The theme of the upcoming seminar is ‘Punishment.’ They will read a variety of things on the subject of punishment. We’ll try to think about why we punish, why we punish as we do, how the way in which we punish reflects the values of American society and how those values have changed over time.”
Sarat has been involved with NEH summer seminar programs for well over a decade. When asked how he became involved in these programs, he noted that he has always wanted to reach out to high school teachers for the purpose of sharing what he has learned through his own research and scholarship. “I’ve been interested for a long time in ways in which people who do what I do, who teach in colleges and universities, can be supportive of the work of the people who teach in high schools,” he said. “This is a way of being supportive — reaching out and sharing the kind of work that I do and the things that I know with the hope that [the teachers] will be enriched. The teachers are always very enthusiastic and engaged.” For the past three years, Sarat has also conducted workshops of his own with high school teachers from nearby Springfield, Mass.