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The newly renovated Gill Center bustles with activity. After all, this is the epicenter of McDaniel’s study of movement — the place Kinesiology students and faculty alike call home. Three classrooms, three labs, nine faculty offices and a seminar room were newly built inside Gill Center to support a program that prepares students for careers as health professionals, coaches, athletic trainers, physical education teachers, personal trainers and others whose work centers on the science of physical activity and movement.

Just days after her graduation this May, Riley Palmer sailed from Tahiti to Hawaii on board SEA Semester’s ocean research vessel, the 134-foot brigantine SSV Robert C. Seamans. Along the 2,600 nautical mile route, the Biology major from Pikesville, Md., studied the effects of environmental change on remote and pristine Pacific coral reefs.

Kristen Upton ’18 is taking a gap year before using her most recent honor, the Maryland Association of College Directors of Athletics (MACDA) scholarship, towards medical school — if, that is, doing cancer research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) can be considered a gap year.

Less than two weeks after a late March nor’easter dumped more than a foot of snow on campus, McDaniel juniors Taylor Bauman and Garrett Gregoire went fishing in the nearby Haines Branch Creek near the Lehigh Cement Company quarry in Union Bridge, Md.

Eli Williams of Mountain Top, Pa., a senior chemistry major at McDaniel College, has been awarded a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). Williams is spending 11 weeks this summer at the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research in Rockville, Md., working alongside chemists Dr. Jeffrey Hudgens, Dr. Ioannis Karageorgos, and Dr. Kyle Anderson in the biomolecular measurement division conducting research on the dynamical structure of proteins and glycoproteins. Williams is a member of the college’s Honors program and Green Terror Programs. He has served as vice president of the Gamma Sigma Epsilon national chemistry honor society and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society.

A first-generation college student, Brittany Sears is a single mom of a 4-year-old little girl, worked two jobs while attending McDaniel full time and was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome later in life. She earned Dean’s list each semester and was inducted into three different honor societies and, during her senior year, presented her research at the Eastern Psychological Association Conference in New York.

Weaving their papers together with the common thread of religion and race, three McDaniel students created and recently presented a panel at the regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion in New Jersey.

Nearly 100 history scholars — students and professors alike — from a dozen colleges and

Deep into a summer of research, senior Josh Irvin found the proverbial needle in a haystack — the one document, a letter written in 1805 by Revolutionary War general Jeremiah Slade, that detailed the deal that enabled the Tuscarora Indian nation to sell their reservation lands in North Carolina.

The ink was barely dry on Melissa Fry’s 2017 McDaniel diploma before the Biology major immersed in internships first at Yellowstone National Park and then at Mammoth Cave, where she discovered that you really can go home again.