Presentations by Recent Alumni

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Join us in welcoming Alumi Naima Starkloff ’15 and Erick Daniszewski ’14 back to Bennington. Naima will discuss Digging Deeper into Bird Diversity, and Erick will discuss Building a Distributed Datacenter Operating System.

Naima is now in her second year as a biology Ph.D. student at the University at Albany, SUNY. While at Bennington she was intrigued by all things related to bird diversity. Now she is taking it to further depths by asking questions about the ecology and evolution of blood parasites that live within birds. She is a research fellow at the New York State Museum, aiding the curator of birds in the maintenance of collections. Defying Bennington odds, she decided she likes genetic work and for the first time in her life is spending a lot of time in the lab. This summer, she presented her Bennington senior thesis as a poster at the North American Ornithology Conference.

Erick graduated Bennington in 2014 with concentrations in Physics and Computer Science. While at Bennington, he contributed to a number of projects including: building a distributed file system, building a ‘bare metal’ operating system, and building a radio telescope, among other things. After graduating, he worked for a government defense contractor in Cambridge, MA ,and has since moved on to work for a startup in the datacenter industry.