Student-Faculty Research

Domestic violence. Drug smuggling. Priests hauled into court for scandalous behavior. Welcome to Spain in the 17th century.

Spring is in full bloom in William & Mary’s biology labs, with more than 350 undergraduate students spawning marine invertebrates.

It was a hard act to follow. What could possibly be a follow-up to a group of freshmen discovering a new form of life and finding new genes in its genome?

The numbers didn’t seem right. “I just didn’t expect the figure to be so big,” says Niall Garrahan ’14. Garrahan was looking at calculations related to the value of land purchased by the City of Boise, Idaho.

For the past five summers, while other students were hitting the beach, William & Mary math majors had been hitting the books and the labs to conduct computational mathematics research.

The writing is cramped, and ink bleeds through the 400-year-old manuscript. There are letters missing or substituted, strange abbreviations and various words that seem to make no sense.

The nest sits nearly a hundred feet up in a lone loblolly pine in Richmond, where a pair of eagles makes their home along the fall line of Virginia’s longest river. An interesting story unfolds as the eagles star in their own reality show.

The William & Mary chapter of the Marine Science Society is only a year old, but has already been honored with the Outstanding Student Section Award from the Marine Technology Society for 2012.

What do horses, movies and math have in common? They’re all subjects of research conducted over the summer by William & Mary undergraduates.

Cold atoms are going to generate hot research at William & Mary.