Colgate was recently awarded seven highly competitive grants totaling more than $1.6 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), allowing the university to enhance faculty-student research opportunities as well as expand on-campus summer programs for K-12 teachers and college instructors.

An NSF grant will fund associate professor of psychology Kevin Carlsmith's research into the underlying principles that guide attitudes about aggressive interrogation.

It was one of the most enduring social experiments of the Communist era: since the revolution of 1917, Russian families from various backgrounds have lived together in urban communal apartments. Colgate professors Alice Nakhimovsky and  Nancy Ries, with colleagues from around the world, have created an online museum to systematically document this unique lifestyle through pictures, video clips, articles, and artifacts.

While his students are on summer vacation, Patrick O'Neil, a social studies teacher from Charlotte, N.C., is spending time in a "summer school" at Colgate University.

Graham Hodges has written numerous books and articles about slavery.

O'Neil and two dozen other K-12 teachers from as far away as California are taking on the role of students, receiving a history lesson of their own as they attend the Institute on Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad in upstate New York.

The three-week seminar at Colgate is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and supported by the university's Upstate Institute.

"Our goal is for teachers to bring back what they learn here to help jump-start their students' knowledge," said Colgate professor Graham Hodges, director of the teachers' institute.