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Summer in Hamilton tends to be more dormant than the academic year, but tucked away in laboratories and library corners, ������Ƶ students have been making life-changing discoveries as they assist professors with their research. Here’s a glimpse into a few of those pockets of campus:

• It’s the size of a bread box, runs on 9-volt batteries, is about the weight of a cell phone, and could help home owners conserve energy. This device in development at ������Ƶ will detect the R-value, or thermal resistance, of wall insulation. Michael Michonski ’12, the fourth in a series of students who has been part of the project, is researching the device’s accuracy, stability, mobility, and consistency in Professor Beth Parks’s physics lab, and in homes around Hamilton.

������Ƶ has submitted an application to patent the technology, which Parks hopes to license to a local company that could manufacture it for homeowners. Funding for the project has come from the Justus ’43 and Jayne Schlichting Student Research Fund and the Upstate Institute.

• The forests in northern Ethiopia are disappearing as the country develops its agriculture. So, striking a balance between Ethiopians’ livelihoods and preserving biodiversity is the challenge, said Lindsay Shepard ’12, who has been assisting religion professor Eliza Kent.

Professors Catherine Cardelus, Tsega Etefa, and Peter Scull are collaborating with Kent on an interdisciplinary project to develop an educational conservation program in partnership with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC).

“They’ve done some impressive sustainability efforts with preserving the forests and the indigenous trees,” Shepard said, explaining that such efforts gain support from the church’s theology. Google Map images showing the churches encircled by small patches of lush forest, which are surrounded by vast areas of brown farmland, bring Shepard’s point into focus.

Shepard has also been looking into the ways in which ecotheology is incorporated into various indigenous groups’ belief systems and trying to gauge how receptive the community would be to sustainability and forest conservation efforts.

The hope is that the ������Ƶ team’s work will inform northern Ethiopian community members how they can most effectively maintain the patches of indigenous forest protected by Ethiopian Orthodox churches.

• Comparing the background and behavior of a water utility director in California to one in New York City may ultimately impact the utilities consumers use. Ted Carey ’13, Noah Goldberg ’12, Louisa Jelaco ’13, and Onnalee Kelley ’12 assisted political science professor Manny Teodoro with research on water utility management.

Teodoro is studying the backgrounds, experiences, attitudes, management and political behavior of utility administrators in order to advance knowledge of utility leadership and what factors help utilities succeed.

The students contacted and interviewed scores of CEOs and directors of utility companies about their work and positions. The first-of-its-kind study, sponsored by the Water Research Foundation, asked questions relating to how effective the executives feel in doing their jobs and about their career paths. A supplementary online questionnaire followed the interviews. Afterward, the students coded all of the answers and identified patterns in the data.

Teodoro will be conducting on-site interviews at various locations around the country over the next several months and plans to present the study’s results at a conference next year and in a published report.

— Barbara Brooks and Monica Dutia contributed to this report