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.
Vassar’s second annual Summer Immersion in the Liberal Arts introduced 63 first-year students from historically underrepresented groups to virtually every aspect of campus life.
More than 30 Poughkeepsie High School students took part in Exploring College and Getting Ready for High School, two programs run by the Vassar College Urban Education Initiative to help prepare community youth for their next academic challenges.
Vassar is supporting a lawsuit that seeks to block ICE from expelling from the United States international students who must take online classes because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
