STIP Student Freddy Lopez Assists in the Eye-tracking Research to Examine Alcohol Product Packaging's Appeal to Youth

 This summer, we were research assistants on the Summer Team Impact Project “Eye-tracking Research to Examine Alcohol Product Packaging’s Appeal to Youth” under Dr. Matthew Rossheim and Dr. Matthew Peterson. My partner –Erica Harp –and I focused on recruiting participants for the study throughout the summer. We targeted GMU summer camps for the 12-17-year-old age range and undergraduate and graduate summer classes for the 21-25-year-old age range. We sent emails out to professors and camp directors asking if we could recruit their students for our study.

Upon approval, we visited as many camps and classes to hand out flyers with information about the study and directions on how to participate. Although we managed to recruit a good number of participants, our recruitment efforts were hindered by a variety of obstacles. Some of this included lack of responses from professors and camp directors, accommodating 12-17-year old’s needs such as transportation and parental consent, and lack of attendance from participants who had signed up to take our study.

As someone who hopes to conduct my own research in the future, this study gave me a great insight into how one goes and conduct recruitment efforts for a study. Although this project is very different from the one I wish to conduct, I am grateful that I got to see the ups and downs of a research project. I learned that there will always be obstacles that may put one’s work behind schedule, but I also learned strategies on how to combat that. This research can also have great implications on policy development and it reminded me why I love research in the first place. Research is such a unique way in which you can find a solution to a problem you find interesting, and I hope to do this once it is my turn to conduct my own study.

STIP Student Daniel Shookster Analyzes the Quality of Life, Movement Capabilities, and Fitness of Police Officers and Firefighters in Prince William County

This summer I worked on the public safety wellness and resiliency summer impact project. Over the summer I learned how to conduct a research project under the supervision of mentors who have conducted studies on similar populations and topics. This project focused on analyzing the quality of life, movement capabilities, and fitness of police officers and firefighters in Prince William County.

Each week subjects came to the SMART lab for fitness assessments and movement screening. Before fitness testing subjects filled out questionnaires that assessed their quality of life. Functional movement tests were done to assess asymmetries and overall movement quality. Fitness tests were done for all 5 components, muscular endurance, muscular strength, body composition, flexibility, and cardiorespiratory fitness. After each subject completed their fitness assessment, we created a custom fitness program for them based on their personal goals, current fitness level, injury history, and any other necessary considerations. After receiving their program, it was cool to see how excited they got and to hear about their plans.

Being able to give back to those who protect and serve us felt good and gave me a new perspective on police and firefighters. Over the summer I gained skills and experience running tests in the SMART lab that I would not have had access to without the project. Being able to gain an understanding of how to conduct a study from start to finish, and laboratory experience are benefits I will take with me to graduate school.

STIP Student Jon Rossi Explores Translating Significant Biological Data through a Novel, Intuitive Graphical User Interface

Hi, I’m Jon Rossi and I am working on the STIP titled Translating Significant Biological Data through a Novel, Intuitive Graphical User Interface. The goal of this project is to develop a tool, useful to biologists, which allows one to find significant gene interactions. There are multiple different groups working alongside each other on this project. There is a graphic design team involved in the visual aspects of the project such as presenting the data and ensuring the interface is aesthetically pleasing while also being functional. There is a middleware team who works closely with everyone and handles the infrastructure of the project. Finally there is the backend team, which I am a part of, who works on processing the data. Doing so entails using statistical techniques and tools to process large amounts of gene information and isolate significant relationships. For instance, someone might be interested in comparing which genes are active in a sick person to those that are active in an unaffected person. Examining the differences in gene expression between various populations is a fruitful course but often presents issues with regard to both the size of the task and the subtleties involved. Due to the sheer volume of data that many of these samples contain, it can be very difficult to uncover any relationships that exist and novel methods have to be developed to approach this problem. 

I have a certain degree of interest in bioinformatics and in general how computers can be applied to scientific problems. As a result, when I saw the posting for this project, I eagerly applied. I think a project of this sort is a good way to learn new things as well as encounter interesting and previously unknown topics. In terms of my long-term goals, the techniques and skills developed while working on a project like this are certainly in high demand in industry, additionally being involved in the scientific applications of computing is a goal of my own. The work on this project also has required me to learn some new techniques and technologies that would otherwise be difficult to encounter in standard coursework which itself is valuable experience.

A typical week at work entails a lot of programming. In particular, implementing various statistical tools, or processing the data into manageable forms are typical activities for me. Oftentimes it requires familiarizing myself with some new tool, and a decent amount of time is devoted to simply testing and experimenting. Additionally, given the multiple teams on this project, there is always an element of conference with other groupmates where we try and integrate our work together. Throughout this project I have had the opportunity to learn about various techniques used for gene expression analysis, including the PCIT algorithm and differential wiring. I have also had the chance to learn about and apply some statistical learning techniques. Overall, this has been a very rich experience as the work itself and the related subjects are quite interesting.

STIP Student Alexis Robbins Works with Machine Learning to Integrate Medical Applications with Computer Science

 What initially interested me about this project was the future implications to biomedical advancement. These cutting-edge computer science techniques, computer vision and machine learning, allow pattern recognition to be successful in problems that were previously too complex and contained to many variables. And the future medical applications of this, especially with systems as complex as the human body, are practically endless.

This project has given me a great amount of experience with coding and research that will be very useful in my future career. Specifically, learning data science research procedures in a biomedical setting was extremely valuable.

A typical workweek begins with a Monday morning group meeting discussing our successes and failures and how to improve our trajectory for the research and well as key ideas to explore. During the week we are mostly conducting in depth research and experimentation; this is mostly writing scripts, troubleshooting, organizing input data and possibly running neural network trials, comparing and analyzing results. The week concludes with a team meeting on Friday with our other partner research groups, Health Informatics and Nursing, along with all respective faculty mentors.

After looking back on the project, I realized that I discovered a passion for data science. I have begun to build an understanding of how powerful recent technology can be in solving problems that were previously unsolvable.

STIP Student Sanjana Raghavan Approaches Experimental Literature through Creative Writing

Hello, my name is Sanjana Raghavan and I am an English major with a concentration in literature. Although I am an English major and I love reading and analyzing texts, my passion lies in creative writing. This research project started when I was working on a flash novella with my mentor, Professor Laura Scott, and she suggested trying a symbolic story line to tie in the gaps. I decided to write about the life of a fruit fly, and that was where this novella was born. The fruit fly pieces held a different urgency, and were formed from vivid, stark prose. Initially, I wanted to challenge myself to write a more experimental novella and solely focus on the life of a fruit fly. However, the lure of paralleling an unlikely human protagonist (a gay and Indian (South Asian) American woman) with the fruit fly soon drew me, and I was struck by the idea of a character who was confined by her body and skin in the same way a fruit fly is confined by its life cycle.

On a weekly basis, I either write, edit, research, or collaborate with my peers or my mentor to workshop and implement edits. The vast majority of my process is simply writing, editing, and repeating the cycle until I arrive at a publishable product.

In terms of my long-term goals, I plan on going for an MFA in creative writing. I will submit my finished novella to literary magazines and publishing agencies, and I may also use it as part of my portfolio for the MFA application. This project was extremely helpful because I do not normally work in longer forms, and my work is not usually this experimental. I feel much more confident approaching longer forms and challenging myself to try new things in my writing. I also found peers who were working on similar projects, and their edits were very useful.