URSP Student Maggie Rodgers is the Assistant Director for Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible in Contemporary Society

During the 2^nd semester of my freshman year at Mason, my mentor, Professor Howard Kurtz, asked me to be his Assistant Director for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in my senior year. The Crucible is a play about the Salem Witch Trials and its affects on a community. At the time, I had no idea this process would lead me to undergraduate research!

When I entered the theatre program at Mason, my goal was to become well rounded in all aspects of the business while developing a strong skill set as an actor. My undergraduate research is helping me achieve my long-term goals because I am developing strengths in areas I am not as knowledgeable in such as directing and dramaturgy. I am also developing great leadership and collaborative skills (which are key assets to succeeding in theatre).

For our production of The Crucible, Professor Howard Kurtz and I want to focus on themes that relate to a modern audience such as community, nature, and the decay of structure. Currently, I am doing bookwork such as extensive character analysis and compiling 5 different versions of the play including the Original script. The goal is to create a dramaturgical packet for the actors. Once we get into rehearsals next year, actors will have this as a guide and we can begin to create a strong sense of community among the actors so that the production will expose those aspects. Professor Kurtz and I want the whole process to be very collaborative and it all starts with us developing ideas to create a society that modern audiences spanning of different age groups can relate to.

Right now, I am creating questions for Act 3 and Act 4. I have discovered different dynamics among different age groups in the play. All in all, my research is a process where I am developing as an artist and a human being. I will continue to push forward with my Oscar research in hopes to uncover new ideas!

URSP Student Nathan Jordan Learns a Redundant Ultrasound-computer Interface Task

As a student researcher at George Mason I usually begin my day at 8:00am in the morning from Monday to Friday.  When I first come in to the lab I take a seat at my desk and check on the labs email to see if I can schedule any new subjects that have voluntary signed up to participate in my experiment.  After I have responded to the email it is generally time to run my first subject for the day.  I bring them in to the lab and sit them down so they can read and sign a consent form so that they are able to participate in the study, in order to know that they understand the study I will answer any questions they have initially.  After answering their questions I will then bring them back to the experiment room where they sit in front of the labs robot and begin the experiment.  The experiment generally takes one hour to complete during which I provide instruction on the task and give encouragement so that they stay task oriented.  

Throughout any day I generally run 1-3 subjects and occasionally I get to run subjects on the weekend. In between subjects I have time to read various literature related to my field, most of the time I research journal articles, and find different kind of analytical theories and algorithms that I can apply to the data that we collect during the experiments. The other third of the time that I’m in the lab is spend doing the data crunch in order to create charts that can be used to better understand the data.   All of the data analysis that we do for our experiment is done using MATLAB which the bioengineering department at GMU has taught since our freshmen year.  I find that it is easy to work with and a very valuable tool to analyses large data sets.  In addition to my usual day in the lab we have a lab meeting and journal club meeting once a week in which the undergraduate students, graduate students, and mentors get together to discuss where everyone is in their research and provide peer input.  During the journal club a journal article is chosen and discussed by everyone in the lab.

I initially got interested in working in a research lab when I took class provided my mentor Dr. Joiner.  During the class he would provide examples of what they did in his lab and gave the class an assignment on it.  I thought that it was really interested and approached him the following semester about possibly working with him through the OSCAR USRP program.  We worked together to come up with a project and submitted an application.  Working as a graduate researcher has taught me very important lessons that I will carry on with me throughout my career as a researcher.  I am blessed to have such an opportunity and will continue to take the knowledge that I have learned as I progress in my career.  I would like to thank Dr. Joiner for being my mentor and my peers in the sensorimotor for giving me support during my undergraduate experience.

URSP Student Matthew Robinson Explores Reform of the Post-Communist Czech Military and NATO Expansion

My interest in this project grew out of a presentation I made 6 years ago. In a summer class on democratic transitions, I explored the Czech case. That research examined the development of civilian control of the armed forces through the 1990s, the reforms that led up to NATO accession in 1999, and the establishment of an entirely volunteer force in 2004. My interest in this subject matter rose again during a seminar about collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. For my term paper, I sought to examine continuities in post-communist governance, and outlined an expansive project involving a comparative study of changes to public institutions like those responsible for education and national security. I wanted to use Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia as examples for tracking changes to communist institutions in dissolving states, and East Germany as a contrasting example of integration into pre-existing structures in a democratic state. My instructor rightly counseled me to select a topic smaller in scale. He indicated that the project I envisioned would be more appropriate for more involved study, and might require thirty, forty, or hundreds pages to allow for a thorough analysis. Soon after selecting the presidency of Václav Havel as a new topic, I attended an information session for the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program. The big picture was still too big to tackle, but returning to the military piece began to look like a realistic prospect.

This project relates to my professional goals of analyzing and teaching teaching history. In my experience, nearly nothing aids in comprehension current events than familiarity with the historical context of interacting nations, and the dynamics that shape them. Of my passions, global history is the only one that I can envision as the foundation of a career, and teaching presents the best opportunity to put that passion to use in public service.

On a weekly basis, I move closer to my goals by reading, building an outline with notes, and writing annotations for sources as I go along. I also call and email institutions to secure access to archival sources. Ideally, those sources will provide the basis for an original argument about the effectiveness of steering the post-communist military away from its design as a piece of the Warsaw Pact structure. Since 1993, the Czech Republic has had no less than 16 Defense Ministers, compared to 8 in Germany and 7 in the United States. Most have been politicians with little military expertise, and scrapped successive reform programs, hindering meaningful progress. I am sifting through the evidence that convinced NATO of the readiness of the Czech Republic to join the alliance.

This week I reached a staff member in the Office of the Historian at the State Department after we had traded voicemail messages last week. She clarified the scope of material that was unlikely to be available for me, but also sent me several links to identify documents that have already been released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and limited archival material available through an electronic collection from the Federal Depository Library at the Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

URSP Student Jennifer Jones Conducts Lipid Profiling of Fish Species in the Potomac River

Research has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my undergraduate career. My initial interest in this project began in the Spring of 2013 when I started a research project under Dr. Gregory Foster. We investigated the Bioaccumulation of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) in the Potomac River Fishery, including levels, species differences and the proximity to wastewater discharge for the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. I was thrilled when Dr. Foster approached me with another research opportunity that would allow me to work alongside him as well as a way to continue my previous research with him. After further discussion on the topic, we found that a lipid profile is vital to assess the mechanism in which PCBs bio-accumulate in organisms. In order to do so, we must first isolate, characterize and analyze the various lipid classes found in the fish tissue. From this data we will be able to correlate the lipid composition to PCB concentrations. I was overly excited when I was able to get an OSCAR research grant for the Fall 2014 semester! My project primarily focuses on understanding the relationship between PCB bioaccumulation and lipid composition in fish. Further, we can gain insight into how this correlation affects populations of aquatic organisms, and has the potential to show how it affects humans who are consuming these organisms.

This week I completed the first part of our experimental procedure. I spent over eighteen hours in the laboratory prepping and preforming the experiment. This included my least favorite part: the physical homogenization of the fish samples in a blender. This week I processed samples of Blue Gill that were collected from Gunston Cove, Virginia. So far I have been able to isolate the total lipids, neutral lipids and polar lipids from the fish tissue. Next week I will be able to separate out the free fatty acids from the isolated lipids. Once this procedure is finished, I will be able to run my samples through the Gas Chromatography Mass Spectroscopy (GC-MS) at the Prince William Campus to get my lipid profile of the Blue Gill species. I am very excited to see the outcomes and compare these results to the data I collected from the previous semester!

URSP Student Ryan Pfeifle Uses Microlensing

I entered the astrophysics field of microlensing as an intern at Goddard Space Flight Center over the summer; for all intents and purposes, I brought my work back with me for the fall semester. It hit me on the 10^th of July – given our equipment at the GMU observatory, we should be able to detect microlensing events! At the beginning I was optimistic but hesitant about the prospects of the research, but the more I read into other observatory locations and equipment, the more confident I grew about the chances of successfully detecting these magnification events. The exoplanet research group here at Mason discovered only the other year that the observatory was capable of conducting research on transit-timing but no one had yet looked into microlensing, so my mentor and I changed our project from moon composition mapping to microlensing. Just the question of whether or not we really could see these events was exciting enough for us to go forward with the research.

The project has been a huge success so far, and I would like to see microlensing research continue at Mason. It’s my hope that our data will prove our location is conducive for these observations in the northern hemisphere, and thus be added as an observatory location for one of several international follow-up microlensing detection surveys. Not only that but I would like to get other universities in Virginia involved to create a student research network between the physics departments across the state.

Observations are conducted as often as possible, weather permitting; such is the nature of ground-based astrophysics research. In order to maximize the number of targets we point to each night, we prioritize targets by elevation in the sky – observing the targets lowest in the sky first and working up to the targets at higher elevations – and we have to move quickly when observing because of the time it takes to point the telescope and observatory dome in the direction of the designated target event. Outside of the observatory I spend most of my time (currently) triangulating the position of these events within our images, which sounds much easier than the actual process. Soon, however, the observations from our location will be out of our view and we’ll move on to data processing in order to finalize our results.

This past week in particular was rather exciting; we did not expect to see a lot of these events at our latitude – they are rare in general – but after reviewing two different observatory lists of hundreds of these events, our list of targets rose from eight to nineteen, and we were just alerted of several more!