Kamsky repeats!

Grandmaster Gata Kamsky clinched his second consecutive U.S. Chess Championship title yesterday with a 1.5-0.5 victory over Yury Shulman in the finals. Kamsky is now a three-time winner, with his first title coming in 1991. The last player to win back-to-back titles was Lev Alburt in 1984-1985. The women's championship has gone to tiebreaks and will be decided today; by this time tomorrow either Tatev Abrahamyan or Anna Zatonskih will be newly coronated. Last year's champion, Irina Krush, finished in third place.

Two of my former colleagues were recently highlighted for unveiling their culminating engineering project, a combination blood pressure / atrial fibrillation monitoring system. Adam Strom '10 and Jeff Spielberg '10, good friends with whom I served for multiple years on the Dartmouth EMS officer board, completed this project while finishing their BE degrees this winter. The first patient for the device was none other than Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim. This is an exciting achievement that has great potential. Way to go, guys!

Speaking of Dartmouth EMS, they organized the second annual Northern New England Collegiate EMS Conference this past Saturday at Dartmouth College. Comprised of a series of training sessions and two mass-casualty incident drills, the event was attended by squads from Tufts, Mt. Holyoke, the University of Vermont, the University of Massachusetts--Lowell, Amherst, Colby and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, along with host Dartmouth. I had the privilege to participate in the event, first as a drill evaluator and later as an actor in one of the simulations. It was an impressive undertaking, and I take my hat off to them for pulling it off in fine style.