Hampshire College

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.

Students at Hampshire take advantage of courses on this campus and throughout the consortium, studying various aspects of natural science ranging from biochemistry and environmental chemical processes to quantitative analysis.

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, agriculture, geology, and many health science fields.

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.

Facilities and Resources

Hampshire’s advanced chemical instrumentation laboratories are among the finest of any liberal arts college and are open and available to all students. Lab equipment includes a state-of -the-art laser ablation-inductively coupled mass spectrometer, an inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometer, a gas chromatography-mass spectrometer, a high performance liquid chromatographer, ion chromatographer, and a Fourier transfer infrared spectrometer (and much more).

The program has received funding for teaching, research, and instrumentation through grants from the National Science Foundation, Pittsburgh Conference Memorial College Grant Program, Society for Analytical Chemists in Pittsburgh-Undergraduate Analytical Research Program, the Kresge Foundation, the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Most recently, organic chemistry professor Rayane Moreira has been awarded a Cottrell College Science Award for research, with Hampshire students, to study novel green chemistry synthesis approaches and catalytic properties.

Students have access to a variety of advanced chemistry courses, seminars, and talks through the Five College Consortium. Every year the Five College chemistry lecture series brings a renowned chemist to give a series of talks at the five colleges. Students have access to a large collection of journals and texts through the Five College Library System and the various programs in the five colleges. 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.