URSP Student Valerie Nguyen Explores the Histopathology of Corals

My journey with URSP begins last year at an open presentation led by a URSP associate and a couple URSP students. From there, I went to the website with the contact information of the different heads of departments and emailed Dr. Ester Peters. She suggested that I work with her on a continuing project she had, the project was histopathology of corals subjected to several naval munitions compounds. Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated with marine biology, so this project immediately appealed to me. I also found it very pertinent, since coral reef health has been noticeably declining worldwide, and the time to have conservation efforts is now.

The internship with URSP will be my first, which undoubtedly will help me in my future as a doctorate candidate. Working in the lab has also taught me valuable skills as a technician, such as procedure and lab safety, but also intangible skills such as navigating inter-laboratory dynamic and meaningful communication with my superior. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to work on this toxicology project, which will undoubtedly show how these munitions affect an animal already endangered by anthropogenic sources.

The first few weeks of this experiment were slide creation, in which I cut paraffin-embedded tissue samples into 5 micrometer thin sections and placed them on slides. Then, I stained them with a specialized stain to better see the separate tissue layers and mucus producing cells. Currently, since all the slides I need for my experiment were created and stained, I’ve been reading the slides at 400x magnification in order to grade tissue health.

I’ve learned many things from my time in the lab already. One particular lesson that has stayed with me is persistence. Histopathology is far from the most engaging science, and unfortunately there aren’t many sources on histopathology of coral due to lack of interest and funding. This has led me to a months-long process of learning how to distinguish tissue, how to grade tissue health, and how to prepare slides correctly, even taking 4 hours to stain 1 rack of slides. However, I’m beginning to see the payoff of my persistence in learning the material and carefully performing the techniques. Hopefully, I’ll continue to grow my skills as a biologist and researcher. I believe I’m definitely on the right track.

URSP Student Alyssa Rowan Investigates How the Bangladeshi Government Can Create an Energy Portfolio and Engage the International Community

I originally considered the OSCAR program in the spring 2016 semester. I was writing a term long research paper regarding the energy portfolio of Bangladesh. I wanted to broaden the aspects of my research so I decided to focus on humanitarian issues surrounding environmental equity in Bangladesh. Through discussion of the prior with my mentor I developed the research question: How can the Bangladeshi government create an energy portfolio to engage the international community when environmental equity is not an international priority? My hypothesis is the international community is prioritizing other political issues due to economic benefits, political process, and immediate threat. I desire for the project to not only expand upon my previous research but build upon the knowledge that is essential to a dynamic and ever-changing field, Environmental and Sustainability Studies. In a broader scope, the project will encompass the values and ideals that are necessary to resilience: social justice, human rights, and environmental equity.

At the conclusion of my research, my paper regarding Bangladesh will allow our nation's leaders to see the immediate threat climate change poses to social equity and energy security. I also plan on submitting my paper for publication. I also desire to present my research at the appropriate forums including but not limited to research conferences and symposiums. The research project will lend information that is essential to the development of a better international community that promotes social justice, energy security, and environmental stability.

Throughout the past weeks I have been preforming literature analysis, filling out the IRB application, and forming questions to ask government officials, non-profit organization leaders, and non-governmental individuals. Through literature analysis I have been able to form in depth questions that will answer my research question stated above. I have learned that time management is a necessity and that one must be open to setbacks while preforming research. In addition, I have learned that research is ever evolving and always changing. 

URSP Student Anson Rutherford Studies Genetic Algorithms to Creatively Solve Problems

My project is focused on trying to use genetic algorithms to solve problems in creative ways. Genetic algorithms are used to solve a problem where we can judge the success of an individual “guess”, but don’t have any way of predicting what guesses will perform well before testing them. A typical genetic algorithm will make a number of random guesses and use the results of those guesses to better inform future guesses, often by making guesses similar to those that performed well. Given enough time, a genetic algorithm will find an optimal solution. My research hopes to adapt the many great things these algorithms have to offer to problems where we want to find more than a single optimal solution. Instead, I hope to construct an algorithm that can find a wide variety of acceptable solutions to a given problem. This is useful is situations where we’re more interested in learning about the question than in solving the problem.

Genetic algorithms are inspired in a lot of ways by biological evolution, which was one of the reasons I became interesting in genetic algorithms in the first place. A lot of my initial fascination came from experiments that simulated aspects of biological evolution, evolving either the physical structure or intelligence of an artificial organism over time. Finding an overlap between my interests in evolution and computer science was exhilarating, and I have been studying the subject ever since. I have always enjoyed learning for its own sake, and hope to meld these three interests into a career of research and discovery.

My project requires me to simultaneously plan and implement the algorithm. Obviously a lot of coding is involved, and so I’ve spent a lot of time programming basic functionality so that we can do build off of it. A lot of that involves implementing similar systems and testing their functionality. The other aspect of my project has been researching the many other genetic algorithms that exist, and using that information to form my own. Learning about the innovations of other researchers has been fascinating, and I hope that my research can help add to the wealth of useful information on the subject.

URSP Student Jessica Rauchberg Investigates Neurological Disability and its Influences on How We Communicate our Performances of Gender and Sexuality

I always knew I was interested in research and really wanted to apply to OSCAR, but I was a bit unsure of where to start. As an active member of the university’s nationally ranked Forensics (competitive public speaking) Team, my junior year, I competed with an argumentative, performance based speech discussing the stigmatization of disabled performances of sexuality and intimacy, inspired by my own personal experiences. I linked together several different styles and pieces of literature to create my performance. During that time, I also took Feminist Research Methods with Dr. Angie Hattery in the Women and Gender Studies program. I told Dr. Hattery about my speech, and after a bit of discussion, she encouraged me to apply for an OSCAR grant to explore this topic through an autoethnographic project. Essentially, using threads of personal narratives, narrative analysis, and more traditional objective styles of academic writing, I am using this project as an investigation on how neurological disability (in my case, a non-verbal learning disability) influences how we communicate our performances of gender and sexuality.

I usually meet with my mentor, Dr. Rachel Lewis, at least once a week. I carve out at least an hour every day to write, edit, or continue my research. This semester, I’ve especially concentrated on learning how to write evocative narratives and manipulate more creative styles of academic writing to work with how I’m constructing my project. It has definitely been a challenge since all my knowledge on autoethnographic writing is self-taught, but I think the effort has been worth it thus far. I’m hoping to extend funding for this project to next semester, as my mentor and I are planning on doing a research symposium and staging an auto performance of the narratives. Additionally, I plan on submitting the written portion of the autoethnography for journal publication in graduate school. Post-graduation, I hope to continue autoethnographic, performance, and gender research. I would also love to eventually receive my doctorate and work in a university setting.  

URSP Student Ariel Kalotkin Studies the Effects of Transracial Direct Current Stimulation to the Prefrontal Cortex

I became interested in the Oscar fellowship by being a part of an ongoing research group, studying the effects of transracial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the prefrontal cortex on complex dual task performance. From this research, I had decided that research was going to be a huge part on my life and more specifically the research I was assisting in continued to intrigue me and motivated me to pursue further questions in this area of study. This is how I developed the research project I am conducting now, determining if there is a method to anticipate how individuals learn to perform a complex task by visualizing the activity in the prefrontal cortex.

Throughout the week, I schedule several participants to come into the research lab and have them play several blocks of a complex cognitive videogame Warship Commander. These participants have the functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) on them, which is recording their brain activation levels. We will be using the data collected from the fNIRS as well as several individual differences, such as, Working memory capacity, personality, problem solving and videogame playing history in order to assess each individual. I have already learned and discovered so much from being a part of this program, for instance, I have learned to conduct a data analysis. Being a part of the OSCAR fellow program is allowing me to pursue research opportunities in my field of study. It is allowing me to advance my knowledge in addition to also preparing me for further research that I may conduct in graduate school or even beyond that.