More than 60 incoming first-year students took part in this year’s Summer Immersions in the Liberal Arts program, hosted virtually by Vassar’s Engaged Pluralism Initiative.

In a seminar co-taught by History Professor Robert Brigham and President Elizabeth Bradley, students had their work analyzed by real-world experts.

During a long, cold Winter Break in the midst of the pandemic, more than 50 Vassar students, faculty, and administrators gathered on Zoom to take part in the first ever Grand Challenges Winter Creative Project. Participants learned to crochet and used those skills to build a massive crocheted “coral reef” to demonstrate the need to address climate change.

Like many other creatures, some tadpoles are able to alter their appearance, a phenomenon called plasticity, to avoid predators. But do these tadpoles also alter their behavior depending on which predators are threatening them? That was a question Vassar Assistant Professor of Biology Justin Touchon and one of his students, Phoebe Reuben ’17, set out to answer when they conducted a study in the summer 2016 at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Their research was published April 14 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.