Ithaca College

 The 72nd Eastern Colleges Science Conference was held on Saturday, April 21, 2018 at Ithaca College.  The conference drew more than 370 faculty and undergraduate students from 18 colleges and universities across the eastern U.S. Students presented their own empirical research in social and natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, biochemistry, environmental sciences, psychology, physics and engineering.  

At the opening session, conference attendees were given a warm welcome by Ithaca College President Shirley Collado and Dean Wang from Humanities & Sciences, which was followed by keynote speaker Tom Gilovich, the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University.  He spoke on "Why Science Education is for Everyone," discussing confirmation bias and other distortions in people's judgments and beliefs, and arguing that the best way to overcome these biases is through familiarity with the basic principles of the scientific method.

There were more than 175 poster and platform presentations by the undergraduate students attending the conference, including nearly 80 students from Ithaca College.  The day culminated with a banquet at Hotel Ithaca, with awards given for the outstanding papers, posters and platform presentations.   Students from Ithaca College who won awards for outstanding achievement in a poster or platform presentation were:

Youssef Amin, Kyle Richardson & Isabella Moreno-King (Psychology)

Danielle Bucior (Biology)

Kaitlyn Crobar (Biochemistry)                

Cara Hoefen (Biology)

Eliot Hagerty & Peter Westacott (Psychology)

Sophie Hancock, Jessica Collins & Emma Weiss (Psychology)

Jesse Hsu (Chemistry)

Katie Hutton (Biology)

Sarah Vengen & Geselle Dominguez (Psychology)

Jason E. Webb (Biology)

Jelani Williams (Biology)

The host committee for this year's ECSC conference was chaired by Cyndy Scheibe and Brandy Bessette-Symons from the Dept. of Psychology, joined by Leann Kanda (Biology), Sebastian Harenberg (Health Sciences), Scott Ulrich (Chemistry) and Anna Larsen (Chemistry).  Next year, the Eastern Colleges Science Conference will be held at Manhattan College in the Bronx, NY.