Hampshire College
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Chemistry
| Researching Trace Metals in Rice |
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| How can you tell if the food you’re eating is as healthy as it appears? For her Division III project, Priyanka Basnet 09F examined that question on a tissue level. More » | |
Science is not just information to learn; it is a process and way of thinking. The natural sciences form a set of theories, methods, and data for understanding the world in which we live. Hampshire’s School of Natural Science engages students deeply in interdisciplinary problem-solving, emphasizing real-world issues and often situating student research at the interfaces of the sciences, for instance, between chemistry and biology or environment.
Students at Hampshire take advantage of chemistry courses on this campus and throughout the consortium, studying various aspects of chemical sciences ranging from analytical chemistry, organic chemistry, and environmental chemical processes to biochemistry.
We have incorporated into our curriculum recent advances in analytical chemistry and offer one of the top liberal arts college chemical instrumentation laboratories, facilitating research in many interdisciplinary sciences including environmental science, biology, sustainable agriculture, geology, and many health science fields.
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| Sample First-Year Course |
Color |
Why are most grass and tree leaves green, carrots orange, and cornflowers blue? Why are blue jays blue, flamingos pink, and frogs green? And what about squid? Their color depends on their need to protect themselves--how does that work? How does an object we look at take on a color our brains tell us we are seeing? What does color have to do with nutrition? This course will start with chemical descriptions and experiments concerning color, and we will then have a series of guest lecturers to give the physicist’s, biologists’s, and psychologist’s understandings of and perspectives on color. Animals and leaves that change color according to outside stimuli, the chemical and physiological basis for color vision, and the interaction between color, food, and mood are some of the specific topics we will explore.
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Laboratories and Equipment Grants and Examples of Research Opportunities The Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (ISIS) works to reconnect scientists with communities so that research is developed collaboratively to address such complex and pressing problems as environmental degradation and toxic and nuclear waste disposal. With programs combining technical assistance, coalition building, education, and original research and writing on the foundations of knowledge, ISIS is developing a new way of doing science that is open, self-reflexive, democratic, and socially responsible. |
Contact Us
Hampshire College
893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002
413.559.5378
Fax 413.559.6081
dof@hampshire.edu